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news
A55, near Valley (via Google Maps)Hit-and-run driver who left cyclist “for dead” has prison sentence overturned
A motorist who left a 51-year-old former army major “for dead on the side of the road” has had a 12-week prison sentence overturned on appeal.
61-year-old William Jones, from Burton, Staffordshire, has instead been given a suspended sentence and was banned from driving for a year after leaving Cathal O’Reilly critically ill with a broken back, protruding leg bone and other serious injuries in a hit and run incident in September 2021.
According to Staffordshire Live, Jones, who submitted a positive breath test in the hours after the collision (though blood analysis put him below the legal alcohol limit), must also undertake 200 hours unpaid work and attend 20 rehabilitation days.
O’Reilly, a former major in the Irish Guards who later worked as a business consultant, was cycling on the A55 near the village of Valley, Anglesey, when he was struck by Jones on 19 September last year. The 51-year-old was riding to Holyhead from his home in London, in order to catch a ferry to Dublin to visit his parents, a 32-hour trip he’d undertaken previously.
In a victim impact statement, O’Reilly said that after being struck by Jones, he had been “left for dead on the side of the road”. He was taken to hospital in Bangor before being transferred to the Royal Stoke University Hospital’s major trauma centre, where he underwent 22 hours of surgery in two days, and remained in a critical condition for five days.
He suffered a broken back, protruding leg bone, and required a skin graft, along with multiple other injuries. O’Reilly’s DNA was also found on flesh embedded in the damaged car belonging to Jones, who failed to stop at the scene.
Police later found Jones’ car at a Premier Inn in Holyhead. The 61-year-old, who was also preparing to board a ferry to Dublin, was breathalysed by police and returned a positive test, though later blood analysis showed that he was below the legal alcohol limit.
Branding Jones a “despicable coward” for leaving him with devastating injuries, O’Reilly said that following the incident, “My life has changed beyond recognition. I am lucky to be alive”.
Jones admitted to careless driving, failing to stop after the incident, failing to report it, and driving an uninsured car.
He stated in court that when he struck O’Reilly, he assumed he had hit a bollard, a claim which a Caernarfon Crown Court judge said “beggars belief”.
The 61-year-old was originally ordered to serve a 12-week prison sentence. But after appealing that verdict on the grounds, according to Jones’ barrister, that there had been a “conflation of penalties” by the original court, the jail term was suspended for one year. He was also banned from driving for 12 months.
Despite telling the court that “it would be inhuman not to have a huge sense of humility and sympathy for the victim in this case”, Jones’ barrister Simon Killeen claimed that the motorist was of good character, had serious health concerns, and was well under the drink-drive limit according to later calculations, before pointing out that instances of careless driving did not carry a prison term.
Recorder Neill Owen-Casey allowed the appeal, noting that the original sentence appeared to have been imposed based on the gravity of O’Reilly’s injuries and the effect on the cyclist’s life, and that there was no specific offence related to causing serious injury by careless driving.
Ryan joined road.cc as a news writer in December 2021. He has written about cycling and some ball-centric sports for various websites, newspapers, magazines and radio. Before returning to writing about cycling full-time, he completed a PhD in History and published a book and numerous academic articles on religion and politics in Victorian Britain and Ireland (though he remained committed to boring his university colleagues and students with endless cycling trivia). He can be found riding his bike very slowly through the Dromara Hills of Co. Down.
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63 comments
If his health conditions were that serious, he shouldn't be driving at all.
The defence barrister states that the 'serious health concerns' of his client are to be taken into account while at the same time the Recorder states that the 'gravity of O'Reilly's injuries' were incorrectly a factor in the sentence.
So the law is concerned with the wellbeing of the offender but not the victim.
This is the reality for victims and the documentary that hawkinspeter linked to conveys that strongly.
I think this does particularly affect victims of certain kinds of offenses. Road deaths would seem to be one of these areas.
However - I'm not a lawyer but I believe this is a consequence of an underlying principle of our laws. Or at least it's their "ideal" - the reality makes it bad for all parties (delays, mistakes etc.). Not just innocent until proven guilty but we're rather err on the side of the accused. Let 10 guilty folks go free than convict one innocent. Indeed originally courts in the UK (and US) required you to say you'd accept their jurisdiction - by pleading guilty or innocent. (It wasn't a great option to try to avoid trial by not pleading however).
This all illustrates, again, how difficult it is to get a "dangerous driving" conviction, so police forces tend to go for "careless driving" instead, a lesser offence with lower penalties. The whole area needs a proper review of the law.
We keep coming across these cases where a driver fails to stop after hitting a cyclist and then claims they were unaware it was a person they had hit, they thought it was a bag of rubbish/ sack of potatoes/ bollard/ whatever.
So I'm assuming this is a legal get-out. Simply drive on regardless and claim you didn't know? Until they can download your memory there's nothing to prove you're lying. Presumably the law needs changing so that it rests on the provable facts rather than the (claimed) perceptions of the driver.
Edit: https://www.pattersonlaw.co.uk/motoring-offences/driving-offences/fail-t....
I don't usually swear but I got to this bit: "Jones admitted to careless driving, failing to stop after the incident, failing to report it, and driving an uninsured car." and the words For "f***'s sake" spilled forth!
I think having to do appropriate unpaid work is a good thing however the bit that shocks me most is that he will get his licence back in 12 months. He should never have a licence again. Period.
My wife and I abandoned our car two years ago and cycle everywhere. All our 5 grown up children cycle for transport. I sometimes wonder how long it will be before one us is killed by these people.
What the actual fucking fuck??
I'm trying to work it out...
You can kill up to three cyclists a year. Any more and you'll lose the element of coincidence. Does that sound about right?
Cyclists - Remember
Cameras front and back for all ye road cyclist (with a brain). Let's get cnuts like this into the chains they deserve. Or. Better..
Agree - legal systems seems flawed here. So go you! All for it for those prepared to pay and to the work for free. And fight the authorities (see NMOTD ad nauseam) to get something done with it.
But given what happened in this one I'm struggling to see what difference it would have made here? Say we got lucky and the camera shows the driver clearly hitting cyclist and it was recovered. I'm pretty sure they're fairly positive this happened in this case anyway. Otherwise if doubt, likely no "careless" and likely no punishment at all. So unless the driver aimed / obviously swerved at him (instead of mindlessly driving over him / "brushing" him) what's different?
BTW this one's already stacked in the cyclist's favour in the way of these things. The victim is clearly a "good egg" / not a "militant cyclist" (military cyclists are probably a positive) and the driver has previous and was committing other provable offenses at the time.
No conviction will fix the victim either. Can we start sorting it so this is much less likely to happen already?
Yes, there is the technology and enforcement route. Though no national standards despite supposed law and guidance (HWC). So that outcome is uncertain and not much consolation for your loss and injury.
Avoidance is an other route. No loss or injury, just 1.5 metre of plastic pipe for about one pound at your local hardware store. Many hundreds saved on technology and due process.
Secure the pipe to your seat tube, perpendicular on the right side, and no driver will be unsure how to pass, like another vehicle, at least 1.5m away.
No, it's not structural so doesn't result in loss of control, as it's only a plastic pipe, should there be contact. It looks odd, which is on purpose, to ensure attention and avoidance.
When people ask why, tell them and hope they tell people about the odd cyclist they met.
Who knows, the road users may understand that close passing is neither justified nor good for the national health...
In this case though, there seems no question of the identity of the car/driver, so how would video have helped?
If a rear camera could demonstrate that prior to the incident the driver was weaving around, acting aggressively or speeding maybe it would have been possible to upgrade the charge to dangerous driving, in which case there could have been no argument about the prison sentence.
Leaving the scene, failing to stop, report the crash etc alone in this case should have resulted in jail time, and it's been done with no video and no independent witnesses previously.
I agree it should have, I'm just saying with more evidence of poor driving available the CPS might not have been so unwilling to go for dangerous driving where there would have been no grounds to challenge the original jail sentence.
Failing to stop should attract an automatic and severe penalty - a lengthy ban (monitored, with jail for those breaking it) and possibly an automatic prison sentence based on a pre-set list of aggravating circumstances.
Someone who can't tell the difference between running over a cyclist and bollard (as well as choses to drive uninsured) should never be allowed to hold a driving licence. They have clearly demonstrated that they are not fit to be behind the wheel of a killing machine.
I thought it did!
https://www.pattersonlaw.co.uk/motoring-offences/driving-offences/fail-t...
So I don't understand the reason he got off the prison time, which seems to hinge on an argument about a different offence.
As earlier
The "up to" is not the issue here. The defence seems to have been that instances of careless driving did not carry a prison term. Indeed so, but failing to stop does. Moreover, where there has been damage caused, the burden is on the accused if they want to play the "but I never even knew I hit anyone, honest"
liedefence.I know of cases where drivers have been put away for 20 weeks, so more than the initial sentence here, for failing to stop after a collision with a cyclist, and it wasnt a problem that they were convicted of careless driving either.
It absolutely is normally an automatic jail term if there is significant injuries, of which theres no question here. So theres either a bunch of stuff missing in how this case has been reported or theyve got this very wrong.
Isn't saying you thought you hit a bollard the same as saying you were driving where you shouldn't?
I'm curious. Why did he think it was a bollard?
Did he see what he took to be a bollard in his path and drive over it regardless? That seems improbable, drivers who see bollards generally don't then drive over them.
Or, having run over something did he then casually assume it must have been a bollard without checking (if he had checked he'd have known his mistake). Are drivers entitled to just assume something they hit must have been a bollard without evidence?
Or is it just an outright lie, suggested to him by his lawyer? Are lawyers allowed to coach their clients to lie in order to take advantage of known defences?
Bollard, Deer, Cardboard box, Sack of Potatoes, fell off ("If everybody had stayed upright there wouldn’t have been any issue.”)
I'm curious as to why it's considered a defence to have hit a bollard rather than someone on a bike. Surely if a driver cannot see the difference between a bollard and a person, then their eyesight is not sufficient to drive. Any "excuse" that involves not knowing what they've done should lead to a permanent driving ban.
If that is the location of the incident in the photograph above, ...bollards?...where?
DA: Their might have been road works along some of the stretch so bollard = cone. Of course well-lit hi-viz wearing cyclist is very different in size and shape to a cone and the original Judge did seem to indicate his belief levels in that excuse.
Did he see what he took to be a bollard in his path and drive over it regardless? That seems improbable, drivers who see bollards generally don't then drive over them
The defence of 'I didn't see...' is accepted with alacrity by the police and courts when there's a cyclist anywhere in the case. A child in the road is considerably smaller and less visible than a cyclist, but 'I didn't see him' is not going to get you off as it does when it's a cyclist.
Actually it will.
(I was actually looking for the story of the van driver who reversed and killed a child on the pavement and got off but this seemed to take the recent top spots).
Good point, but (for interest) have you found any where the vehicle ran into a child when going forwards and got away with it by saying 'I didn't see him'
Yes! In these two shocking cases:
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/lennon-tolands-mum-slam...
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/delivery-driver-who-...
What truly awful stories for this time of the evening.
The poor families.
I feel for you that you can remember them so as to link to them.
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