Justice (Lonpicman, Wikimedia Commons)
Barry Meyer, the tipper truck driver jailed for three and a half years last April after admitting causing the death by careless driving and while unlicensed and uninsured of London cyclist Alan Neve, has failed in his appeal against his sentence.
Mr Neve had been riding his bike from his home in Poplar to his work at PRS Music in Fitzrovia in July 2013 when he was dragged underneath a tipper truck being driven by Meyer.
Appeal Judge William Davis upheld the original sentence yesterday, reports the East London Advertiser.
Rejecting Meyer’s appeal against his jail sentence, the judge said: “He didn’t pay any attention to other people on the road, in particular the cyclist.
“It’s clear Mr Neve was in full view of Meyer and drove straight over him.”
Noting that it was “a bad case of careless driving that caused death,” he added that the case had a number of aggravating factors.
As we reported at the time of the original trial, where Meyer pleaded guilty, those included that he was uninsured, did not have a valid licence for the type of vehicle he was driving, went through a red light and had a string of convictions for motoring offences.
He had been banned from driving five times and had two convictions for drink-driving.
> Uninsured lorry driver pleads guilty to causing death of Alan Neve
The judge presiding over his trial last year, Daniel Worsley, said Meyer had "a sustained history of driving offences showing wretched disregard for the safety of road users."
In June 2015, Traffic Commissioner for London Nick Denton imposed an indefinite ban on Alan and Colin Drummond, directors of the company Meyer was driving for, from operating a haulage business.
He said they had indirectly caused Mr Neve’s death "by their own failure to fulfil one of the most basic responsibilities of an operator or transport manager – to ensure that a driver of one of their HGVs was qualified to drive it."
Born in Scotland, Simon moved to London aged seven and now lives in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds with his miniature schnauzer, Elodie. He fell in love with cycling one Saturday morning in 1994 while living in Italy when Milan-San Remo went past his front door. A daily cycle commuter in London back before riding to work started to boom, he's been news editor at road.cc since 2009. Handily for work, he speaks French and Italian. He doesn't get to ride his Colnago as often as he'd like, and freely admits he's much more adept at cooking than fettling with bikes.