A driver who hit a cyclist head-on and was accused of leaving the scene was fined £145 and given four points on his licence after pleading guilty to careless driving at Bexley magistrates’ court in January. Laura Cameron sustained a broken leg in the collision which took place while she was riding home from winning a race at Lee Valley VeloPark at around 10pm on August 19 last year.
The court was told that a charge of leaving the scene of an accident had to be dropped because a police notebook containing evidence was lost.
Cameron, whose victory on the road track beside the Olympic velodrome secured her a Cat 1 licence, was hit when a fast food delivery driver turned head-on into her path. Her fibula was broken, while her tibia was snapped and ended up protruding from her shin.
“It was like a thousand burning hot splinters running through my body at a million miles an hour as I was tumbling upside down and landed on the hardest, coldest surface you can imagine,” she told the London Evening Standard.
The cyclist, who is hoping to be back racing next month having now signed for Drops Cycling Team, endured six months of rehabilitation and is now pursuing a civil action against the driver’s insurers to cover ongoing treatment costs.
Cameron said she felt disappointed and let down by the justice system and the police in general. “What annoyed me most was that they seemed to skip over my injuries. It was almost as though they disregarded them and didn’t bring them into consideration.”
CTC’s road safety and legal campaigns officer, Duncan Dollimore, commented:
“Four points is only one more than the minimum the court were obliged to impose. The magistrates have therefore allowed somebody to carry on driving for a living, potentially under pressure regarding delivery times and targets as a fast food delivery driver, with seemingly little regard to the risks posed to vulnerable road users.
“Many people might consider that the seriousness of the incident and injuries Laura sustained are not reflected by the sentence imposed, or by the seemingly indifferent attitude taken to the loss of vital police evidence, which does nothing to reassure victims of road crime that their cases are taken seriously.”
Nearly two years after the government promised to conduct a review of motoring offences and penalties, there is uncertainty over whether it will ever take place. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Andrew Selous, recently said that sentencing would be considered under a wider consultation of all criminal offences that will begin by the end of the year.
10 thoughts on “Driver fined £145 after head-on collision left cyclist with broken leg”
Words fail me
Words fail me
As I said yesterday, in
As I said yesterday, in response to this on Facebook, it’s not as if they skipped over her injuries. They did. Mostly.
The charge is careless driving and, without any more information, it appears to fall into being that offence. So the question is how do you deal with an injury? There’s no offence, yet, of causing serious injury by careless driving. There’s a petition, of course. It has about 3500 signatures on it. Or, perspective, 70k less than one which asks for drivers to be limited to 15mph around horses.
Injury is an aggravating factor in relation to a carless driving charge. Is the fine too low? We don’t know what the facts are or what level the Magistrates decided the sentence fell into.
But, for balance, the civil law claim, should she succeed on liability, is exclusively concerned with her injuries.
Fast food.. it’ll kill you.
Fast food.. it’ll kill you.
From the Standard:
From the Standard:
“Her solicitor, Jennifer Buchanan, of Fieldfisher, said the sentence was more lenient than others handed out the same day to drivers with bald tyres. “
Duncann wrote:
FFS…
Duncann wrote:
So the implication is that [b]potential[/b] to cause injury is a worse crime than actually causing one?
“The cyclist, who is hoping
“The cyclist, who is hoping to be back racing next month having now signed for Drops Cycling Team, endured six months of rehabilitation and is now pursuing a civil action against the driver’s insurers to cover ongoing treatment costs.”
I wish her luck.
At the same time Martin Porter, QC, is bringing the first cyclists private prosecution for dangerous driving following the Police declining to take action.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cyclist-brings-uks-first-private-prosecution-for-dangerous-driving-a6917816.html
If sucessful it could prove to be a ground breaking case.
I’ll bet that if a Police
I’ll bet that if a Police notebook was ‘lost’ during a murder inverstigation the CPS and the Police would find a way to bring about a prosecution if they wanted to!
andy_schweiz wrote:
So nothing gets done about The “lost notebook”. PC plod just plods on as normal and I assume that the negligent office who is responsible for this miscarriage of justice is still in a job ?
Couple of things about the
Couple of things about the lost notebook:
1. We don’t know what was in it. I struggle to see what could have been in it to compromise a charge of failing to stop but leaving the careless driving intact but presumably there was something.
2. As to whether a murder charge would have been dropped for a lost notebook, it depends what was in the notebook. If a sufficiently important piece of evidence was in it then yes, a murder charge may have to be dropped over a lost notebook. It is not a question of how important the charge is, it’s a question of evidence. If you don’t have enough evidence then any charge, from littering to high treason, has to go. I’ve personally seen drug dealing cases dropped for similar reasons.
3. We don’t know whose fault it is that the notebook was lost. It could be the officer whose notebook it was, it could be somebody at the store where an old, finished notebook was being kept. It could be that the notebook came out of the officer’s pocket during a subsequent struggle with a violent offender somewhere and was lost that way. It could even be that the notebook was exhibited at a court case and lost by the court. With so many thousands of police notebooks being used daily, just about anything can happen to them. It’s probably been lost by negligence, but only probably. And not necessarily the offier’s.
Ultimately, if a bench of magistrates are going to give what on the face of it (with all the usual caveats about unreliable court reporting) is a ridiculously low sentence for careless driving then having the extra charge was not likely to make it any more severe.