“Car driver gets 4 years in jail for killing a pedestrian“
Sadly I see a lot of these stories and it reminds me of the poem Autogeddon by Heathcote Williams written in 1987. Specifically it reminds me of these lines:
…. Hit someone over the head with a discarded chrome fender And kill them: Life. Take the precaution of attaching the fender to a car And kill them: Six months, Licence to drive briefly suspended. …
Looking back I see that I’ve blogged about this before, back in February 2007 when I was hit by a car. So in terms of my 300 words today I guess I’m cheating.
The story that prompted this case concerned the death of Grace Chan a few months after my own lucky escape. The driver ran a red light causing a collision with another car that killed her. Turns out the driver had six previous driving convictions.
It concerns me that not only is our society so driven by the car that the vast majority of money and effort goes into roads (the Sea to Sky expansion being one example), but it seems that the justice system also favours the car driver.
This guy has a history of breaking the law and finally ended up killing someone. For that he has to spend four years in jail. He has a lifetime ban on driving, which given his history seems meaningless. It’s also taken three years to get to this stage, which means twelve months from now his sentence will exceed the time his victim has been dead.
Maybe I’m just continuing a theme I started yesterday. I rather suspect the black dog will be visiting Paul Molund, Chan’s husband. I hope he can keep it away but I fear the sentence given out by the court won’t help his effort.
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