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news
Statue of Justice, Old Bailey (licensed CC BY 2.0 on Flickr by Ronnie Macdonald).jpgCyclist who was victim of hit-and-run guilty of assault and criminal damage
A York cyclist who was the victim of a hit-and-run incident has admitted smashing the window of the vehicle involved with his D-lock after the driver refused to give him his insurance details.
Richard McDermott, aged 37, pleaded guilty to causing criminal damage and assault in connection with the incident on October 22 last year, reports the York Press.
The motorist involved, Ian Lowson, 41, was referred by police to a driver improvement scheme but faced no further action.
The incident took place at 6.30pm following what prosecutor Cathy Turnbull described to York Magistrates’ Court as a “stand-off” between the motorist, who was driving a 4x4, and the cyclist.
Both were waiting to enter the junction of Mill Lane and Heworth Green where temporary roadworks were taking place.
As they made their way through, travelling in opposite directions, McDermott was knocked from his bike.
There were conflicting statements from witnesses, with one saying the motorist had swerved to avoid a traffic cone and another saying that Lowson had speeded up as he drove towards the cyclist.
Police said that traffic cones marking out the roadworks may have led to confusion among road users at the location.
He failed to stop afterwards and McDermott, whose handlebars and front wheel of his bike had been crushed, set off in pursuit of the vehicle, catching up with it on East Parade.
Witnesses said they saw the two men shoving each other there.
Kevin Blount, speaking in mitigation for McDermott said: "Had he (Lowson) stopped at the scene, had he helped out, had he offered assistance, I am sure this would never have deteriorated to the level it did.
"There could be no conceivable way that the driver didn't know he had hit the cyclist."
"The driver clearly wasn't having none of it, clearly had no intention of stopping and no intention of putting right what he had done and provide his insurance details.
McDermott received a six-month conditional discharge and was told to pay the £150 repair bill to the vehicle.
Magistrate Malcolm Smith, chairing the bench, commented: "We feel there was a lot of provocation on the part of the driver of the vehicle."
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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41 comments
Want the insurance details?
http://askmid.com/
This is where you get the insurance details. Take lots of information at the scene if the driver fails to provide any information - location, circumstances, even age and appearance of the driver. Insurer fails to respond? Go to court for damages. Legal assistance and supporting evidence may be useful.
cyclist should have denied everything, didn't see the car, didn't realise he had hit it etc etc.
After all I bet the car wasn't hi vis, how could he be expected to see it.
I thought that's how the roads work these days.
On the other hand, assuming that sice it has been accepted the driver trashed his bike, it xould be the damage to the car he had to pay for would hacve been less than the damage to his bike, which he may not have recovered without the criminal damage.
For those people on this forum who dont know - if your involved in any rtc whether thats damage only or injury then, by law, you have to exchange details and this includes insurance details. Whether you claim or not is entirely your own decision.
Oldstrath - obviously we disagree about "parts" of the incident, but thats what discussion is about, is it not ?
The reason he hit the bike does matter because we cant prosecute someone if they haven't done anything wrong. Being completely arguementative, "what if" a child stepped out, the vehicle swerved and hit a cyclist. Under your hypothesis this does not matter as for you the reasons why dont matter. You have to look at the whle picture before making a decision.
So on this incident looking at the evidence to hand, yes he did hit the cyclist damaging the bike, how much we dont know, no he didn't cause any injury (according to the article), yes he did drive off. Now witnesses said he swerved to avoid a cone, others said he speeded up. It is not clear, so with contradictory evidence the case would not go to court unless the Police could prove that one side was incorrect in their evidence.
Meanwhile in other news: £1.8m fine for a broken arm. Quite horribly broken by the sound of it, but an arm none the less.
http://press.hse.gov.uk/2016/port-operator-fined-after-worker-injured-by...
Not bike related but just further demonstrates that the public road is a free for all compared to defined and so say controlled workplaces.
Roll on presumed liability... Who am I kidding.
Roll on a government that will even discuss presumed liability...
Hurrah. http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/proposed-legislation-to-...
...and the comments on that page. Ooof. Less hurrah, more predictable pro-driver and anti-cyclist dogma.
A sizeable chunk of people seem to be so stupid and unreasonable they'll only understand laws and police campaigns to enforce them.
Some of those people ride bikes. But it's when they get behind the wheel of a car that they become really dangerous to others.
Presumed liability operates in civil law. The burden of proof shifts to the car driver to demonstrate that he shouldn't pay up for the damage. It has no effect on the criminal law.
..was kind of my point, but apologies for not drawing the distinction.
Maybe holding drivers criminally responsible, in the case of a collision with a more vulnerable road user (unless they can prove otherwise), would prove to be more of a deterrent than the current arrangement.
And this whole stupid nonsense, court time, violence, damage and a criminal record because 2 road users at a poorly laid out roadworks were both too pig headed to avoid a collision, insisting on their 'right of way'.
There was one better outcome for the cyclist, an absolute discharge. But that sentence is not available to the Court on the sentencing guidelines.
They could have found him not guilty. A few issues there, one he pleaded guilty. Two, the evidence is clear. Three, provocation is not a defence.
So, in terms of having a clear evidential case against the cyclist it's a slam dunk. Bear in mind all of the claims made in relation to the driver are the Defence solicitor's claims. No one took issue with them, the bench agreed, and gave pretty much the lowest outcome it could give.
So, the motorist. Well, assuming that he maintains the case of not knowing there's no way to establish any intent. Ditto the failing to stop etc.
It's hard, without having heard the trial, to say any more than that.
I wrote - "2 wrongs dont make a right" - to spark some half decent discussion rather than the usual drivel that appears and i'm glad to say it worked.
Yes the driver should have been prosecuted, why he wasn't i dont know, possibly due to the inaccuracies in the witness statements the CPS would not take it any further. Yes he should pay for the damage to the bike, and as its a reportable rtc then his insurance details WILL have been given to the cyclist, what he did with those details is purely his choice.
i wish people would stop saying the motorist got away with it again, because there are thousands and thousands of motorists get prosecuted every year either through the courts or by penalty tickets.
The resultant court sentencing has nothing to do with the Police or CPS either and that, to a certain extent, is where the problem lies.
The motorist did 'get away with it' though, and it is 'again'.
In what world is hitting a human with a car less of a crime than hitting a lump of metal with a d-lock? In the fantasy, car-biased land of the CPS apparently, aided by judges who offer no or pathetically low sentences and police who (perhaps understandably) cannot be bothered.
In the world of evidence, the thing needed to bring and prove a case. We haven't heard the witnesses but, it seems, it was more of a case of he said and he said. Which, in terms of the crimnal burden and standard of proof, is going to fail, in relation to the motorist.
In terms of the cyclist the only question was whether charging was in the public interest. Once it had been charged, his own admission (which is clear evidence) sinks him.
Evidence? The car hit the cyclist, and didn't stop. What else do you need as evidence that the driver used his car to do violence?
According to the cyclist. Not according to the driver it seems. Or the conflicting witness evidence. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary how do you satisfy the criminal standard of proof?
What, the bike crushed itself? My impression is that the disagreement is about whether the driver was a careless fuckwit or a deliberately violent fuckwit. In a reasonable world this wouldn't matter, neither class of idiot would be allowed a licence to gad about with a few tommes of metal.
How damaged was the bike? His lawyer claims it was "effectively run over" and that "there was no conceivable way that he could not have known." How did he then catch up to the car? On foot? There's nothing at all clear from the reports and the "evidence" being presented is a plea in mitigation and not evidence of the guilt of the driver. A certain amount of latitude is allowed here and, it seems, the Magistrates were quite happy with it. But it's still not enough evidence on which to secure a conviction.
How is it that we are passionate enough to comment on how these cases should be tried without having any insight into the evidence?
If the car was caught in congestion, quite possibly. If the car wasn't held up, it's unlikely he could have caught it on a working bike either. There's nothing suggesting the statement about it having been run over was contested, but since the driver wasn't charged with anything, there wasn't any need for a lawyer to defend him.
The statement need not be contested. It's forming part of a plea in mitigation on behalf of the Defendant. It's an explanation as to why he put a D lock through someone's window. We have no information on what damage was caused to the bike at all, only the Defence lawyer's version.
What's clear is that the Bench thought there was provocation, but it's a bit late to do much about that.
What we need to be dispassionate about here is how cases are dealt with. It's a slam dunk on the criminal damage. There's simply no defence available.
What's missing is why the driver was not charged. And none of us has an idea other than the notion that people in cars should be held to a higher standard with no regard, it seems, for actual evidence. Failure to stop is, frankly, a very very easy matter to prove, but this obligation to stop will only exist if the driver knows or should have known that an accident had taken place. The code for charging requires that there be a realistic prospect of conviction. Once charged the Court can only convict if it's "sure." The fact that no charge was ever brought here is a fairly good indication of a lack of evidence on which to base a realistic case.
If your going to throw accusations about regarding what a driver did dont forget to include the "fuckwit" cyclist as well as he is no better.
He may be 'no better' but he is a long way less dangerous. That's the point you seem to miss, with your 'two wrongs etc.' moralising. Hitting someone with a car is likely to hurt them badly. Hitting the car with a bike (or even a d-lock), at most damages the car a bit. The situation is not symettric, and a reasonable legal system would recognise this and protect more the weakler party.
"throw accusations about regarding what a driver did"
Do we disgree that he hit the bike? What's left is WHY he hit the bike. To you that matters, to me it is utterly and completely uninteresting - he used a dangerous thing in a dangerous manner - that should be enough to call into question his continued privilege to drive. You clearly see this as about punishment, I don't, I simply see it as removing a danger from the road.
And what proportion of drivers break the law everyday, I would suggest most. Be it speeding, illegal parking, tailgating, eating, drinking, phone, applying makeup, reading, etc etc etc.
How many drivers are prosecuted out of the total? effectively none, then you move on to consider why there are drivers with 40 or 50 points on their licence who have not had their licence revoked.
I will agree the courts and the police aren't THE problem. The problem is a system where juries(drivers), police(drivers), CPS(drivers) won't deprive people of the priviledge of driving a motor car.
Why does vigilatisim arise? Maybe when there is no faith in the system to combat a problem? How many cyclists have faith that the system is actually there to protect them, to remove problem motorists from the roads? How many cyclists are getting the opinion that they are scum that have no right to redress?
This large study showed 75% of a very large sample. Bearing in mind a few would be following heavy lorries through the fairly narrow streets of MP it would suggest to me that the real answer is virtually everybody.
http://www.westerngazette.co.uk/25-cent-drivers-speeding-Milborne-Port/story-28560374-detail/story.html
Are you sure about that? I was hit by a car and injured, I reported it to the Police but nothing happened after that. Actually, it's happened twice and the Police have not provided me with insurance details in either case. Not that I can do anything with insurance details once I've got them anyway, the insurance company can just choose to ignore me.
You're conflating two issues. The insurance deals with the civil aspect of any claim. Did you suffer any losses? Did you pursue them?
The police role is to investigate the criminal aspect.
Not really. It was stated that because it was a reportable RTC the cyclist will have been given insurance details. This isn't necessarily the case. Who should give the insurance details after the driver has failed to stop? ...and how do you make a claim if the insurance company just ignores you because the driver hasn't told them about the incident?!
He initially failed to stop but was caught upto later and his insurance details will no doubt have been obtained. I've never heard of an insurance company ignoring someone and if there is any concerns over an alleged claim the insurance company usually obtains a copy of the rtc booklet submitted by the Police and goes from their observations.
The cyclist had to pay the repair bill on the SUV. OK, but did the motorist pay for the repairs to the "crushed" bike - we know that he didn't face any prosecution but did he even have to pay for the damage HE caused???
Criminal damage surely? I know hitting a human with a car seems OK these days but deliberately driving overs someone's property must be criminal damage.
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