Western Mail: Killer drivers ‘given softer treatment’

Drivers who kill on the roads are treated more leniently by the courts than people convicted of deaths through negligence or workplace accidents, new research has revealed. Analysis of appeal cases showed the toughest sentence for drivers in fatal road accident (RTA) cases was half the length of the longest sentence for non-RTA cases. And a study of cases in other courts found that the average fine was 21 times higher for non-RTA deaths than for ones involving road vehicles.

The research was conducted by University of Bristol graduate Jake Voelcker, from Pant Glas, Gwynedd. “Drivers who kill through carelessness are regarded by the judiciary as unlucky but often blameless,” said Mr Voelcker, 25, a graduate in Politics and Social Policy. An implicit empathy – ‘There, but for the Grace of God, go I’ – is evident. “Four times as many RTA fatalities occur as homicides in Britain, yet there are less convictions for lethal motoring offences than homicide offences. “Convicted drivers typically receive lesser sentences than other comparable criminals, and often receive a monetary fine with no detention sentence at all.”

Mr Voelcker’s research concentrated on deaths of “vulnerable road users” including pedestrians, cyclists, children playing and horse riders. Judicial bodies hold no separate data on sentencing in such cases, so Mr Voelcker drew on newspaper reports and a database of court transcripts held by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute. His samples of non-RTA deaths included breaches of workplace safety rules, gross negligence, medical malpractice and neglect. It excluded murders, so that all defendants were ones deemed not to have killed through premeditation. Mr Voelcker’s study of appeal court transcripts showed a maximum sentence of seven years for RTA deaths, compared with 14 years for others.

Averages were 2.8 years and 4.1 years respectively. In the samples produced from a trawl of press reports, the maximum sentence for an RTA death was eight years, compared with 12 years for a non-RTA death. Average sentences were 1.8 years for RTA deaths, 2.45 years for non-RTA deaths. The difference was even more striking when fines were compared, the maximum being £2,000 for RTA deaths and £15,000 for the non-RTA group. Average fines were £373 and £7,875 respectively.

In one case magistrates said a teenage male driver who killed a child cyclist had suffered only a “momentary lapse”, although experts had said the accident would have been avoided had the car not exceeded the 40mph limit. “Surely speeding is not a momentary lapse in the same way that a split-second loss of concentration is? Yet this driver received a fine of only £500 and no detention sentence,” said Mr Voelcker, who holds a transport design diploma. “In another case, a driver failed to stop at a pedestrian crossing and killed a pedestrian who was halfway across, yet the incident was deemed by the judge to be ‘on the cusp’ between dangerous and careless driving.

This again appears to indicate the difficulty in securing a conviction for dangerous driving, and shows that drivers are sometimes not held responsible for the presence of the car, only for its misuse when this is sufficiently flagrant.” Mr Voelcker, a cyclist and Land Rover enthusiast who designs bilingual and charity websites, said most police officers, magistrates, judges and lawyers were drivers.

“And is there not a link between the fact that almost all drivers who are convicted of killing are male, and that almost three-quarters of all magistrates and judges are men? The evidence indicates that this is no coincidence. “Those policy makers and legal officials who are in a position to change matters are mostly drivers and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Those young, elderly, poor and female demographic groups who are disproportionately likely to be killed as vulnerable road users, and disproportionately likely not to have access to a car, are relatively powerless and cannot change the status quo. “This is not a deliberate conspiracy. “It is simply the way in which the legal system has evolved over the past century.”

Killer drivers ‘given softer treatment’

Sentences handed out after death crash convictionsIn April 2006 vet Geraint Wyn Jones was given a 15-month prison sentence suspended for two years and banned from driving for two years after admitting causing the death of 62-year-old magistrate Margaret Huxley.

His eight-month-old baby daughter Mari was also killed in the collision, on the A487 in North Wales, but police dropped a second count of causing death by dangerous driving on compassionate grounds. Witnesses told how the vet made a “sudden and unexpected” manoeuvre on to the road’s other side to avoid a road gritter before the collision.

Earlier that year, in January 2006, Dafydd Evans, 41, a key figure at Llanelli TV production firm Tinopolis, was found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving. He left the scene of the accident in which his Mercedes collided with 24-year-old Darran Beynon’s motorcycle, leaving the victim dead, or dying, in the roadway. A court heard the former BBC journalist had been drinking at the time of the crash. He was jailed for three years.

Death by dangerous driving was also the verdict in the case of Christopher Antonio, 19, and Christopher Churchill, 28, who were racing each other when Antonio’s car ploughed into a taxi minibus at 70mph, killing three of the six passengers. Antonio was banned for four and a half years and Churchill for seven, out of a possible combined maximum of 28 years.