To: Electronic Telegraph <et.letters@telegraph.co.uk>
Re: Tackling the real culprit of road deaths
Date: Sat, 06 May 2000

Subindex

Dear Sir,

I am writing in defence of the sentence (one year probation, 300 hours community service and a 5 year driving ban) given to the young driver who killed two girls while speeding, which one of the victim's families is quoted as calling a "mockery of justice" (Speeding driver who killed girls given probation, 6 May 2000).

One cannot expect the members of a victim's family to be rational and objective, but the truth is that the young driver was behaving no worse than thousands of older and supposedly wiser citizens do every day without raising more than an eyebrow and with little danger, if they are brought to account at all, of incurring more than a small fine and short ban.

I remember a case you reported last year (Ton-up police caught in speed trap, 10 September 1999) in which three police officers were caught travelling at almost double the speed limit in their own speed trap. They where each fined £350 and banned from driving for 28 days. As police officers who should have known better, surely they are far more culpable than the 19 year old driver, who was just following their bad example. The possibility of a small fine and a short ban was obviously no deterrent. Most people - even police officers - get away with it. How was he to know that it would result in him killing two people?

In fact, those three policemen are more responsible for the death of the girls than the 19 year-old who actually ran them down. But the real culprit is society at large, which refuses to recognise the culpability of every speeding driver for most of the deaths and injuries that occur on our roads. The freedom to speed with virtual impunity is more important to many drivers than the lives of all those who are killed - provided they are not their own sons or daughters, of course.

Severely punishing a speedster who has been unfortunate enough to kill or maim someone is not only unjust, it also manifestly fails as a deterrent.

Instead of unjustly picking on the unlucky few after they have killed or maimed someone, we should simply ban all speedsters from driving for long enough to effectively deter them and others. We just need the will to do it.

If at first it results in half of all motorists having to leave the road for a year or so, all the better for those prepared to keep strictly to the speed limits. It would go a long way to creating a less hurried, stressful and aggressive motoring culture and would save hundreds, if not thousands of lives every year.