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Saturday 19 January 2013

Taxi driver kills for £35

Dear Sir,
May I take issue with the adverse comments in response to the sentencing of a taxi driver after an horrific accident. (19/1)

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Whilst I have every sympathy for the bereaved relatives, bereavement's no qualification of road safety and sentencing. On the contrary road safety and sentencing cannot be based on raw emotion at all. As for BRAKE, apart from their declared green environmental policy against motor transport, what exactly is their qualification in road safety and sentencing? In their predictable and shrill demands for tougher sentencing of drivers, they ignore some perspective which, In fairness to your readers, needs some balance.

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If it were not for drivers, the economy would collapse over-night and we would begin to die in large numbers from lack of basics like, food, water, heat, medicine, healthcare and so on. So drivers keep far more alive than they kill and are not the enemies of the State that anti drivers claim. In fact there is less death on the road, from all causes, after 300 billion driver miles a year than from accidents in the home. Are there such shrill calls for imprisonment for home owners then? Of course not! So clearly this concern for life is selective and against drivers.
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Why should one driver have an accident where, for just bent metal, the police are not even concerned but from exactly the same scenario and actions, by virtue of the terrible coincidence that human flesh intervened, there are calls for heavy terms of imprisonment? Thank goodness the courts are beginning to understand this it seems.
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The fact remains that when society, from necessity, encourages humans to operate dangerous machinery with other humans intermingled accidents and bad things will happen. Can we really incarcerate people for doing their best but still making mistakes and getting it wrong? If that were so we would all be in jail for mistakes. Although convicted of careless driving, which is not based on fact but subjective opinion, unlike evidence of murder for example, this was still an unintentional accident in a scenario that society allows.
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Wishes
 

1 comment:

  1. Kill someone in ANY other way and you're looking at a very heavy sentence. Why should there be one law when a person is 'in control' of a motor vehicle and another for everyone else?

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