I know that this is going to be a controversial posting, but it is something that is one of those issues that nags at me so that I need to get it out of my system. That was the prime purpose of my blog, which is why I need to write this posting even though I guess that, in turn it will irritate others. It is a factor which has come up many times certainly in my memory over the past 20 years, but the particular occasion recently that it has come to my attention is following the sentencing of Vincent Tabak for the murder of architect Jo Yeates in December 2010. Tabak received a life sentence with a tariff of a minimum of 20 years. However, for Yeates's parents this was not enough. I accept that they grieve for their daughter, but the statements they made after the sentencing suggest that the pair of them are very nasty people in themselves with an outlook which is barely different from Tabak. The couple are David Yeates aged 64 and Teresa Yeates aged 58. They seem symptomatic of the 'indignitary' approach which is so common in British society and is reinforced by the hysterical tabloid newspapers, notably 'The Sun' part of the Murdoch media empire of News International.
I have no sympathy for Tabak and certainly believe he deserves a life sentence in prison. What alarms me is the desire for the destruction of our legal processes, the move to arbitrary sentencing including execution and the fact that the language used in condemning the killer in fact help create an atmosphere which promotes such violence rather than seeks to reduce it.
The Yeateses, who have no legal training, complained that there was no death penalty in Britain and regretted it was not an option. However, in fact it seems as if even that would have been insufficient for them. Instead it appears they would have preferred to have Tabak tortured to death. In an official statement they said: 'The best we can hope for him is that he spends the rest of his life incarcerated where his life is a living hell, being the recipient of all evils, deprivations and degradations that his situation can provide.' They should be at least cautioned for trying to provoke fellow prisoners of Tabak from doing him harm. What they have no understanding of, is that the behaviour they are lauding is just the kind that excited their daughter's killer. To urge prisoners to visit such behaviour on the convicted man is simply to legitimise the kind of violence he carried out himself. In turn this will add to an 'atmosphere of permissiveness' in that others will things such 'deprivations and degradations' are acceptable for them to turn on any man or woman they feel is 'guilty'. Rather than doing anything to reduce future perpetrators, the Yeateses' language simply lionises such behaviour.
These days it seems entirely legitimate to wish for a 'lynch mob' approach to sentencing. You only have to sit in a pub when the news of such cases comes on television to know how many volunteer executioners there would be. In many ways all the legal reforms of the past three centuries seem to be forgotten and the average person in the street feels they are qualified to act as judge, jury and executioner for the person they believe to be guilty. The selection of the 'guilty' seems more based on the appearance of the person than any legal arguments. I am convinced that Amanda Knox is guilty of the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. The murder was a particularly perverse one and yet because Knox happens to be a beautiful American, she has to be innocent in the public eye and no-one is going around saying she should suffer the kind of 'deprivations and degradations' that were visited on Kercher. In fact, with her release on appeal earlier this year, she has mutated into a victim herself. This highlights how patronising the Americans are to other people's justice systems. Knox is portrayed as suffering at the hands of a foolish Italian court that somehow missed seeing her 'innocence' shining through.
A patronising attitude towards courts was seen in the Yeates case. It is clear that her parents had no faith in the legal system. Her father said: 'I always knew he was guilty but feel relief because I don't know how I would have reacted if the jury had come back with a verdict of manslaughter.' Again the father feels he should have been the judge, deciding on the sentence, not through the approach of law, but simply on his gut feeling. It is interesting, he probably felt the same about Christopher Jefferies, Jo Yeates's landlord who was an early suspect on to whom Tabak tried to shift guilt. I am sure if Jefferies had been charged, even though we now know he was innocent of the crime, David Yeates would be telling us how he should have been executed and how he knew that man was guilty.
The simplicity of this ability to sniff out guilt without any legal training, simply by looking at a person, leads the indignitaries to become exasperated with the legal processes. Teresa Yeates was disappointed that it took three days for the jury to decide on a majority guilty verdict (10:2) for Tabak. She said: 'It was the right verdict but it took so very long.' Of course, she sees the jurors as stupid for not being equipped as she clearly feels she is, to simply detect a guilty man and to sufficient level to satisfy the courts. Of course, the courts, juries and the whole legal system are disparaged by people like the Yeateses and organs like 'The Sun'. They self-righteously know the guilty and see any chance for the so-clearly guilty to have defence or to go through any legal process. Their favoured approach would take us back in Britain literally to the Middle Ages, to the kind of situation England had before Magna Carta of 1215. Such arbitrary execution characterises dictatorships of the kind the UK has helped to overthrow in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but apparently for our own criminals, it is perfectly the kind of system we need to introduce.
Of course, for 'The Sun' even the Yeates's ostentatious statement about the punishments they want inflicted on Tabak are insufficient. The newspaper went further not missing the opportunity to slag off misguided foreigners, in this case, the prison system of the Netherlands, Tabak's home country on 29th October, appended to their article on the Yeateses saying: 'Dutch prisons are known for their luxurious hotel-style facilities, with each cell having its own heater, fridge and microwave'. The British are stunningly nationalistic, no other country, bar perhaps the USA, can be good enough in punishing criminals. Clearly they relish the overcrowded, insanitary conditions of British prisons which lead to murders and widespread reoffending. Much of the British public and the majority of the UK press have no faith in what our Victorian predecessors did, that there is a chance of rehabilitation. In their view as in the USA, guilty is guilty for eternity so the best thing to do is to kill the perpetrator, who will always be easily to detect, quite often because he is always going to be something like a 33-year old European man rather than a 24-year old American woman.
Infected by American culture the UK is now a society in which no emotion is sufficient unless it is taken to the fullest extent. You some how appear neglectful if you are not howling in sorrow or in anger or in calling for vengeance. Few seem alert to the actual words, most extreme so far in the Yeateses' statements, foster the kind of violent society which created the murder in the first place, a society with utter distrust in legal procedures so a society in which lawlessness in all its forms seems to be the only 'solution'. By being indignant, by howling in the media, you only foster more of the same kind of behaviour as that which distressed you in the first place. This is not civilisation it is a return to a barbaric age in all aspects.
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Friday, 11 November 2011
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Cars as Weapons
Earlier this year I produced a posting asking 'When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?' because I noted that in contrast to using a gun or a knife, which kill far fewer people in the UK, you were likely to get only 4 years imprisonment at most, often less for killing someone with a car (and only a £2,200 fine if you run them over and kill them with a bicycle - see the death of Rhiannon Bennett killed by cyclist Jason Howard, but that is a far less common occurrence). Last week I came across an article in a magazine in Hampshire by a man called Professor Colin Pritchard who has a long line of titles. His article was actually about how the media distorts our perceptions of British society. It alerted me to something I had not realised that the US media apparently portrays UK society as facing 'social collapse' though our in 2007 we had 64 males murdered aged 15-24 compared to 4,191 in the USA (which has a population about four times larger), the rate is 17 per million in the age group, in the UK compared to 209 per million in the age group in the USA. Apparently such reports are continuing to make older people fearful. Last year 98 people over the age of 65 were murdered, one third of them by members of their family, given that being over 65 is a much bigger category in fact the rate is only 7 per million per year compared to the US rate of 27 per million per year.
Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).
As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.
Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.
Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.
P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.
In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.
Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm
Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).
As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.
Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.
Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.
P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.
In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.
Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm
Friday, 14 March 2008
When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?
Driving through one English region recently I was struck by the range of sentences handed down for similar crimes. These were:
Wife attempting to murder her husband using anti-freeze leading him to be disabled but to survive: Attempted Murder - 30 years
Man punched and kicked a man to death in a fight: Manslaughter - 14 years
Woman killed a cyclist by running him over in her car while texting someone on her mobile phone: Death By Dangerous Driving - 4 years
On these grounds it is actually more risky in terms of a prison sentence not to kill someone with anti-freeze than it is to murder them with a car. While researching this posting I came across similar comments from the late 1990s about people getting light sentences for being convicted for the offence of Death By Dangerous Driving:
http://www.iankitching.me.uk/articles/death-driving.html
Ian Kitching points out that if this offence which carried a sentence of 6 months to 2 years in those days, though in theory it has been raised to 14 years so in line with Manslaughter (though I yet to hear of a case in which a dangerous driver gets 14 years and guidance to courts is generally 2-5 years). Kitching shows cases in which drivers who have killed one or more people were getting sentences as short as 6 months. You can get 5 years for Actual Bodily Harm and Greivous Bodily Harm sentences can be 5 years to life and in these cases the person attacked is still alive; in addition aggravation such as a racial motive adds typically 2 years to the sentence. So for beating up someone on racial grounds you could get 7 years in prison but if you ran them down with a car you could get away with 6 months to a maximum of 4 years it seems.
Why is it in the UK that the car is not considered to be a weapon? I think partly it stems from the people who are judges. In 2004 16% of judges were women; judges earn £96,500-£129,900 (€128,35-€172,235; US$194,930-U$261,590) which is four to six times the national average salary so they are all very rich people. Though I accept that there are aggressive female drivers the bulk of the aggression on the roads is caused by men. The number of incidents of drivers following others home to attack or berate them has increased sharply even in the past two years (this happened to me and is very frightening, the motives for why they are offended by you are usually obscure). Thus, I believe that judges who rarely walk around outside or find themselves fighting in pub car parks are more sympathetic to accused who harm people using a big car like they drive. They can easily see themselves mowing down some defenceless pedestrian or cyclist without noticing, so they are lenient on the people like themselves, careless, rich men in many cases. It also explains why sentences for rapists are so lenient too and why attempted murder by women of their husbands conversely receives such strong punishment as the judges want to send a warning to their own spouses.
Until the sentences for causing death using a car come in line with sentences for using a knife or a gun or your fists (or ironically tools from a car like the jack) to commit violence then people are going to continue to drive around recklessly fast, using hand-held equipment and know that they are going to get off lightly.
I always warn the six-year old who lives in this house that he is far more likely to be killed by a driver than any other weapon. In 1997 following the Hungerford and Dunblaine attacks most handguns in the UK were banned and deaths from shootings in England, Scotland and Wales combined were only 58 in 2005/06 and 67 in 2006/07 (down from a peak of 102 in 2001/02). In 2005, 3,201 people were killed by or in cars; 48% of these were people not using the cars themselves, which suggests that 1,537 people were killed through a car inadvertently or intentionally used as a weapon. Hence you are 22 times more likely to be killed by a car than by a gun in England, Scotland and Wales (in fact the chance is far greater in Scotland where gun deaths have been in single figures through the 2000s). In 2004 in England and Wales, 282 murders were committed using a sharp implement, predominantly knives so it suggests that in England and Wales you are approximately five times more likely to be killed by a car than a knife.
Why then do courts and sentences see cars for what they really are? Commonly available lethal weapons given to people who would often be refused any firearm or even a knife? A kitchen knife, like a car, is a mundane object, but that does not stop people for recognising it for the lethal object it can become. A car is many kilogrammes of metal able to travel fast enough to smear people across a road and kill them instantly. Even at 30mph (56 kph) someone hit is 10% likely to be killed, this rises to 90% by 40mph. Cars drive down my residential road at 60mph (the speed limit is 30mph but is uneforced by speed cameras) guaranteeing anyone who steps or is on their bicycle and is hit by a car will die. Pro-speeding organisations like SafeSpeed contest the government's figures for road deaths, but to me 827 pedestrians killed by cars in 2001 plus 39,470 injured is far too high and exceeds by many times the deaths from shootings or stabbings for which people receive far, far longer sentences. Speeding in Britain is seen like gun ownership in the USA as some kind of God-given right and one that to these arrogant, usually prosperous men (who resent that the rest of society comes anywhere near their perceived 'level' of course in fact none of us want to go down to their caveman behaviour) is far more important than life itself. The death of even one person from a car is excessive and the sense that there are 'tolerable' levels such as the 107 child pedestrians killed by cars in 2001, is sickening, to seek to do as SafeSpeed does to put the blame on pedestrians for daring to get in the way of their speeding cars, is akin to a gunman saying it was the dead person's fault for not moving out of the way of the bullet that was being fired at them.
It is simple:
Cars are weapons. Reckless drivers are armed murderers. Murderers should be sentenced in line with the law on murder.
P.P. After posting this, another thought came to my mind in regards to sentencing of criminals. In setting down the sentence the judge will often consider how much there is a risk that the criminal will offend again. This is why sometimes people who have murdered their partner or family members get quite light sentences on the assumption that they do not have such a close relationship with the bulk of the population and so are not a hazard to people they are not related to. The things about killer drivers is that they are highly likely to offend again and they are a threat to anyone in society. In the large majority of cases they have no idea who they actually killed, often they have not even seen them when they run them down, and as SafeSpeed makes clear, these kind of people blame the victim for the collision not themselves. Thus, they are actually far more dangerous to the population as they do not believe they did anything wrong and also because their victims are totally random. Even someone running round a US town with a rifle tends to target people he knows or knows of whereas a killer driver in the UK is a risk to all of us. Thus, on this basis their sentences should be higher rather than lower than those people who have a restricted pool of targets. I fear that the issue comes round premeditation and that killer drivers are seen as 'accidental' killers. That is generally true but they have taken a premeditated decision to drive too fast and dangerously and so are effect setting themselves up to kill even if they have not yet selected their target. This is playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives and they should be sentenced in the way you would sentence someone who runs through a city centre blindfolded and firing a pistol and kills someone, they are as dangerous as that. The judges cannot apparently see that, as they are so similar to these criminals in their own behaviour.
Wife attempting to murder her husband using anti-freeze leading him to be disabled but to survive: Attempted Murder - 30 years
Man punched and kicked a man to death in a fight: Manslaughter - 14 years
Woman killed a cyclist by running him over in her car while texting someone on her mobile phone: Death By Dangerous Driving - 4 years
On these grounds it is actually more risky in terms of a prison sentence not to kill someone with anti-freeze than it is to murder them with a car. While researching this posting I came across similar comments from the late 1990s about people getting light sentences for being convicted for the offence of Death By Dangerous Driving:
http://www.iankitching.me.uk/articles/death-driving.html
Ian Kitching points out that if this offence which carried a sentence of 6 months to 2 years in those days, though in theory it has been raised to 14 years so in line with Manslaughter (though I yet to hear of a case in which a dangerous driver gets 14 years and guidance to courts is generally 2-5 years). Kitching shows cases in which drivers who have killed one or more people were getting sentences as short as 6 months. You can get 5 years for Actual Bodily Harm and Greivous Bodily Harm sentences can be 5 years to life and in these cases the person attacked is still alive; in addition aggravation such as a racial motive adds typically 2 years to the sentence. So for beating up someone on racial grounds you could get 7 years in prison but if you ran them down with a car you could get away with 6 months to a maximum of 4 years it seems.
Why is it in the UK that the car is not considered to be a weapon? I think partly it stems from the people who are judges. In 2004 16% of judges were women; judges earn £96,500-£129,900 (€128,35-€172,235; US$194,930-U$261,590) which is four to six times the national average salary so they are all very rich people. Though I accept that there are aggressive female drivers the bulk of the aggression on the roads is caused by men. The number of incidents of drivers following others home to attack or berate them has increased sharply even in the past two years (this happened to me and is very frightening, the motives for why they are offended by you are usually obscure). Thus, I believe that judges who rarely walk around outside or find themselves fighting in pub car parks are more sympathetic to accused who harm people using a big car like they drive. They can easily see themselves mowing down some defenceless pedestrian or cyclist without noticing, so they are lenient on the people like themselves, careless, rich men in many cases. It also explains why sentences for rapists are so lenient too and why attempted murder by women of their husbands conversely receives such strong punishment as the judges want to send a warning to their own spouses.
Until the sentences for causing death using a car come in line with sentences for using a knife or a gun or your fists (or ironically tools from a car like the jack) to commit violence then people are going to continue to drive around recklessly fast, using hand-held equipment and know that they are going to get off lightly.
I always warn the six-year old who lives in this house that he is far more likely to be killed by a driver than any other weapon. In 1997 following the Hungerford and Dunblaine attacks most handguns in the UK were banned and deaths from shootings in England, Scotland and Wales combined were only 58 in 2005/06 and 67 in 2006/07 (down from a peak of 102 in 2001/02). In 2005, 3,201 people were killed by or in cars; 48% of these were people not using the cars themselves, which suggests that 1,537 people were killed through a car inadvertently or intentionally used as a weapon. Hence you are 22 times more likely to be killed by a car than by a gun in England, Scotland and Wales (in fact the chance is far greater in Scotland where gun deaths have been in single figures through the 2000s). In 2004 in England and Wales, 282 murders were committed using a sharp implement, predominantly knives so it suggests that in England and Wales you are approximately five times more likely to be killed by a car than a knife.
Why then do courts and sentences see cars for what they really are? Commonly available lethal weapons given to people who would often be refused any firearm or even a knife? A kitchen knife, like a car, is a mundane object, but that does not stop people for recognising it for the lethal object it can become. A car is many kilogrammes of metal able to travel fast enough to smear people across a road and kill them instantly. Even at 30mph (56 kph) someone hit is 10% likely to be killed, this rises to 90% by 40mph. Cars drive down my residential road at 60mph (the speed limit is 30mph but is uneforced by speed cameras) guaranteeing anyone who steps or is on their bicycle and is hit by a car will die. Pro-speeding organisations like SafeSpeed contest the government's figures for road deaths, but to me 827 pedestrians killed by cars in 2001 plus 39,470 injured is far too high and exceeds by many times the deaths from shootings or stabbings for which people receive far, far longer sentences. Speeding in Britain is seen like gun ownership in the USA as some kind of God-given right and one that to these arrogant, usually prosperous men (who resent that the rest of society comes anywhere near their perceived 'level' of course in fact none of us want to go down to their caveman behaviour) is far more important than life itself. The death of even one person from a car is excessive and the sense that there are 'tolerable' levels such as the 107 child pedestrians killed by cars in 2001, is sickening, to seek to do as SafeSpeed does to put the blame on pedestrians for daring to get in the way of their speeding cars, is akin to a gunman saying it was the dead person's fault for not moving out of the way of the bullet that was being fired at them.
It is simple:
Cars are weapons. Reckless drivers are armed murderers. Murderers should be sentenced in line with the law on murder.
P.P. After posting this, another thought came to my mind in regards to sentencing of criminals. In setting down the sentence the judge will often consider how much there is a risk that the criminal will offend again. This is why sometimes people who have murdered their partner or family members get quite light sentences on the assumption that they do not have such a close relationship with the bulk of the population and so are not a hazard to people they are not related to. The things about killer drivers is that they are highly likely to offend again and they are a threat to anyone in society. In the large majority of cases they have no idea who they actually killed, often they have not even seen them when they run them down, and as SafeSpeed makes clear, these kind of people blame the victim for the collision not themselves. Thus, they are actually far more dangerous to the population as they do not believe they did anything wrong and also because their victims are totally random. Even someone running round a US town with a rifle tends to target people he knows or knows of whereas a killer driver in the UK is a risk to all of us. Thus, on this basis their sentences should be higher rather than lower than those people who have a restricted pool of targets. I fear that the issue comes round premeditation and that killer drivers are seen as 'accidental' killers. That is generally true but they have taken a premeditated decision to drive too fast and dangerously and so are effect setting themselves up to kill even if they have not yet selected their target. This is playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives and they should be sentenced in the way you would sentence someone who runs through a city centre blindfolded and firing a pistol and kills someone, they are as dangerous as that. The judges cannot apparently see that, as they are so similar to these criminals in their own behaviour.
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