man's stupidity
Listening to the radio this morning I heard that the government is thinking of extending the proposal which enables statement by vitims to be read out in court, in particlar to cases of death cuased by dangerous driving.
It is daft to have different sentences for dangerous driving or drunken driving based on whether some gets injured or not. Surely it is a matter of luck, good or bad, whether the result of bad driving causes death or not. Let me illustrate with two recent examples taken from a television programme.
This was a TV programme about Humberside police and was a fly-on-the wall type documentary. This particular episode was following the traffic police. There were two cases of drunken driving. In one the man had driven into a tree and was found slumped unconscious at the wheel. The second the car had creered off the road into a house, the person who lived in the house was in the next room, shcoked but unhurt.
In both these cases the sentences were quite mild fined a few hundred pounds and banned from driving for a year or so. However if someone had been killed there would have been a clamour for much stiffer penalties, but why. Surely the fact that bo one was injured was entirely a matter of luck, if some one had been by the tree or the householder had been in the room where the car had been was not some rational decision by the driver, simply luck.
The trouble is that this leads to a completely random justice system, do something and one day you get a £500 fune and banned for driving for a year, on a different day you get 5 years in prison and banned for life. Surely the sensible, rational thing is to have a fixed penalty for drunken or dangerous driving irrespective of what happens, but is thet too much to ask, probably.
It is daft to have different sentences for dangerous driving or drunken driving based on whether some gets injured or not. Surely it is a matter of luck, good or bad, whether the result of bad driving causes death or not. Let me illustrate with two recent examples taken from a television programme.
This was a TV programme about Humberside police and was a fly-on-the wall type documentary. This particular episode was following the traffic police. There were two cases of drunken driving. In one the man had driven into a tree and was found slumped unconscious at the wheel. The second the car had creered off the road into a house, the person who lived in the house was in the next room, shcoked but unhurt.
In both these cases the sentences were quite mild fined a few hundred pounds and banned from driving for a year or so. However if someone had been killed there would have been a clamour for much stiffer penalties, but why. Surely the fact that bo one was injured was entirely a matter of luck, if some one had been by the tree or the householder had been in the room where the car had been was not some rational decision by the driver, simply luck.
The trouble is that this leads to a completely random justice system, do something and one day you get a £500 fune and banned for driving for a year, on a different day you get 5 years in prison and banned for life. Surely the sensible, rational thing is to have a fixed penalty for drunken or dangerous driving irrespective of what happens, but is thet too much to ask, probably.
posted by Unknown at
11:55 PM
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