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Thursday 12 February 2004

Call this justice? [brit]

I couldn't believe this story.
An illegal immigrant, denied asylum and supposedly deported by the Home Office drove into and killed a nine year old whilst driving a car he was not entitled to drive (no license) or insured on.
The initial sentence of 8 months was a travesty from the outset; especially when you consider that just last week a mother who killed her daughter and her friend's daughter by speeding (the kids were passengers in the car when it crashed) was sent down for 2 years.
Now the judge has been forced to reduce the sentence to 6 months because of a technicality (quite what that is remains unclear) and following normal procedure the shit will be out of jail within three months if he behaves whilst inside.
THREE months for killing a child.
Absolutely disgusting.

15 comments:

  1. It's a tragic story.... But it simply wasn't proved that it was dangerous driving. If I accidentally kill a kid, god forbid, I shouldn't be locked up for live for it, should I?
    The shitty part of this is that he was driving at all without license, insurance or permission to be in the country. Having been the victim of an uninsured hit and run myself, I know how much this can fuck you over.
    Why cant there be spot checks on this stuff, where you have to carry your driving license and insurance bits in the car at all time?

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  2. as I recall the facts were that apart from not being insured the guy was doing nothing wrong and the childs death was not actually his fault.
    but then of course the mere fact that he's an illegal immigrant makes a huge difference to what most people seem to think his punishment should be.

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  3. Thanks for that 'digusted of Mayfair'.
    Without knowing any details of the case other than the 'headline', how do you know what your digusted about?
    Hit and run scuffers are up in front of the beak all the time, they barely make the local paprs, but this one's 'special' cos he's an immigrant.

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  4. The fact he's an illegal immigrant is still here having been denied asylum is one issue. The Home Office has procedures for returning these people, so they have got to get on with it.
    He's driving without a license, insurance or road tax; that alone should be 6 months inside.

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  5. What I was trying to get at, is the guy shouldn't have been driving at all, and if he wasn't driving the kid wouldn't have died. So the mission should be to stop people who shouldn't be driving from driving, right?He failed to stop too, which is what much of the complaining is about.

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  6. Yeah OK so it's an accident he hits the kid but then he fucks off. That's got to be culpable manslaughter or something? I think the real point is that the judge, who presumably would be aware of the facts, was upset he couldn't award a harsher sentence;

    'I regard your sentence as no way commensurate to what you did. The results of your driving are being ignored by the courts.'

    So while obviously the guy should be given residency, bed and breakfast and a nice pay out, presumably, according to the lefties PC brigade which are all over this blog like a rash - the fact is that the judge wasn't happy with how it turned out either and that gives me occasion to be disgusted as well.

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  7. This is just a case of people jumping on the bandwagon and returning to the old times of lynch-mobs, it's pretty sickening that as a supposidly civilised and developed culture, we are still responding to cheap marketing tactics by the press with knee-jerk reactions.
    Look at the facts; he wasn't drunk, he wasn't driving dangerously, he wasn't doing anything wrong. He overtook a car, and a kid happened to walk out into the road at the wrong time.
    This happens all the time. Yes he's an immigrant, but what's worse, throwing him in jail for life at a cost of us as taxpayers to the sum of £15,000 a year, or giving him a short spell inside and then sent off back home to where he came from with the shame and criminal record hanging over him?
    The jails are overcrowded as it is, keeping an illegal in the there isn't going to help anyone. I don't know this guy's story, but I suspect he's going to be going back to something not very nice, wihch may be punishment in itself, why else would he be here illegally?
    I'm surprised Brit jumped on this, I would have expected a little more logic and intelligence to have been applied to anything Brit comments on.

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  8. Um. 'he wasn't doing anything wrong' - Err yes he was. He was doing quite a lot wrong.

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  9. Yes, sorry, I didn't qualify that, I meant at the time he was doing the overtaking manouver. I wasn't refering to the license/tax/insurance issue. That clearly deserves punishment, it's just unfortunate a child was killed. I'm not trying to say he shouldn't be punished, just punished appropriately for the crimes he commited, i.e. license/tax and insurance offences, which would match the sentace he received.

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  10. He was patently doing quite a lot wrong, but well... End of the day, the guy didn't deliberately kill the child, and our legal system doesn't allow for manslaughter charges in the case of traffic accidents except under certain exceptional circumstances.
    The accident was not his fault - there was no attempt to press charges for drunk driving or dangerous driving. The fact that he failed to stop at the scene is however reprehensible, and I don't think the maximum sentence for that crime is high enough - it's one thing not to stop for a fender bender, but the law should recognise a distinction between that and not stopping after hitting a person, and punish accordingly.
    I think that the fact that he was an illegal immigrant is clouding the issue here. That, and the driving license offence, are seperate issues and should be dealt with rigorously by the relevant law enforcement agencies. He'd better be deported sharpish as soon as he gets out of prison.
    The REAL issue is that our laws governing hit and run accidents are far too lax. If you knock over a child and drive off without stopping, you deserve a hell of a lot longer than three months in prison. It doesn't matter if you're an illegal immigrant, an MP, the Pope or the Queen - the law for this offence is the same for everyone and it should be a lot, lot harsher.

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  11. I'm not really concerned with the bloody safety of his driving Jay. He hit a kid and left him for dead, jesus christ what's hard to get about that? I would have thought you'd identify with this since it's normally bikers being left bleeding to death on the side of the road...

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  12. It happens everyday, the only reason everyone is inflamed is because this guy is easy prey and easy marketing for everyone as he's an illegal immigrant.
    We all know road-traffic deaths go unpunished in relation to other manslaughter offences, the laws never get updated.
    Do him for not stopping, do him for driving without a license/tax/insurance, then send him home, big deal. Besides, who lets their 9 year old kid play near such busy roads? I sure as hell wasn't allowed to as a kid, and I was taught the green-cross-code from an early age, there is a bit of give in this situation.
    It's just all very unfortunate.

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  13. This isn't about whether or not he's an illegal immigrant; as I said at the top of the blog, the Home Office are at complete fault there - and perhaps (as Slim said) if they'd done their job properly, he wouldn't have been driving that day, ergo the kid would be alive.
    The galling part of this is that the law has been proven incapable of providing a sentence comensurate with the offence(s) in question - even the judge has said so.
    Whilst he may not have been driving dangerously or under the influence of alcohol, he *knew* he had hit that kid, and drove off. Bang, right there - the failure to stop is however the biggest crime here, and for that alone he should have been given a sentence of at least 12 months.
    As Shinji points out, our hit and run legislation isn't up to scratch, and I hope that gets sorted off the back of this.

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  14. I think it might have been a little easier to have sympathy with your case if you hadn't gone for the same Sun-style headline of 'illegal immigrant kills kid.'There are loads of cases like this every year, the only difference here is he's an immigrant and suddenly the Sun gets all uppity about it - I bet the there are a lot of parents of kids who were killed by people who had a proper license, insurance and were English who find that distinction a little unreasonable.

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  15. This website: "www.RFID2VIN.com" proposes the use of RFID chips that would be left at the scene of "hit and run" accidents.
    These unique identifiers would then act as a sort of "automotive DNA," providing the registration information for that particular vehicle.

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