A question of perception: some thoughts on the Michael Mason case

(Disclaimer: I am in no way connected with this case, except that my partner was a Trustee of the Cyclists Defence Fund, the charity that took this case to court.)

Michael Mason was a lifelong cyclist who was cycling up Regent Street in Central London on 25 February 2014 when he was given fatal injuries through being struck from behind by a car travelling at speed. I wrote two years ago, after a vigil had been held at the site of the collision, and the Metropolitan Police had refused to initiate any legal proceedings agains the driver, that:

If this is allowed to stand without further legal or political challenge, the position seems to be that any good and responsible cyclist cycling in every way within the law can just expect to be be killed by a driver running them over from behind, there need be no rational explanation of the incident, and the driver may just walk away from such a killing with no legal procedure following and a blameless record. The implications are quite horrific for all who cycle on our roads.

As I anticipated then, a rare private prosecution subsequently took place, funded by donations to the Cyclists Defence Fund (CDF). And, as I acknowledged might happen, the jury did take the same view as the police, who did not want to prosecute this case, and acquitted the driver of the charge of causing death by careless driving.

The vigil at the site of the killing of Michael Mason in 2015

Nevertheless, I am absolutely certain that this case should have been brought to court. The CDF doing this brought to light a mass of evidence that was not available when I wrote in 2015. This eye-opening evidence would not have come to light otherwise. It is described in Duncan Dollimore's long blog post for Cycling UK, and this is essential reading as background to the rest of what I write here, or certainly the first nine sections of it (down to the heading There to be seen).

I'm going to set aside here any deficiencies in the police investigation of the case, which may be regarded as serious, and just base what I write on that report of what happened in court, on the evidence that was gathered and presented to the jury. In doing this, I am assuming that the account referenced is a fair, accurate and complete one, as I was not present in court. It is, admittedly, difficult to separate the court case from the administrative cock-up that preceded it. The jury may well have been influenced by knowledge that the police had not wanted the case to go to court, though, as Dollimore's account makes clear, the judge was of the opinion that it was a case that should be tried.

The key points that came to light, it seems to me, are that:

• Michael Mason, cycling at night with lights and reflectors in a brightly-lit Regent Street, pulled out into the right-hand lane to overtake a stopping bus (as cyclists have to do constantly in UK towns and cities)
• After he did that he was hit squarely from behind by Gail Purcell's (the defendant's) car, so hard that he was thrown into the air, a large dent was made in the front right-hand bonnet of the car, and he subsequently died from head injuries.
• Purcell claimed never to have seen him, though she said she heard an impact
• Purcell did not stop until made to do so by a witness who ran after her and caught her at traffic lights.

These are my reflections:

'Seeing' is an internal fact of a person's consciousness, a product of eye, brain and mind (if these are considered separate entities). No-one other than Gail Purcell can really know whether she saw Michael Mason on his bike before or during the collision, or whether she saw anything that might indicate to her she had been involved in a collision. Whether she saw anything or not is fundamentally unprovable in a court case. I daresay the jury took this view, and acquitted her, choosing to believe her account that she did not see anything, or to give her the benefit of the doubt, given that it could never be proved whether or not she was telling the truth about what she saw. They may even have considered that the fact that she did not stop after the crash tended to corroborate the view that she was telling the truth in claiming not to have seen anything. (An alternative interpretation, of course, is that she was aware of what had happened, and was fleeing the scene.)

However, that a driver should remain on the road when their perception of what is going on around them has been, on one tragic occasion, and could be again, so appallingly inadequate as to allow them to kill a human being right in front of their car who should have been plainly visible, that they should remain on the road, driving, with no sanction, is deeply worrying. Can driving with such deficient awareness be regarded as, by definition, 'careless' driving in the meaning of the law? This jury, and juries in many other comparable cases, have answered this question: 'no'. But are they competent to make this judgement, and where does that leave the protection of vulnerable road users?

I'm no fan of jury trials in general, not just in road traffic cases, but in normal criminal cases. I've been on a few juries, and not been impressed with how the system works. I don't think the British 'trial by jury' system leads to an honest, dispassionate search for the truth. I think jury trials tend to be a kind of costumed masque, a theatrical put-on, where a selection of the general public somewhat selected for their lower than average educational or professional attainments are attempted to be cajoled, or tricked, by slick professional actors into believing stories that are not true, or into believing that true accounts are a pack of lies. The side with the better, more convincing actors has a good chance of winning, whether it is in the right or not.

Juries are not a cross-section of the population. Too many people are able to get out of serving on juries, one way and another, and they tend to be the more intelligent part of the population. Anyone connected with the justice system or the police is barred from being on a jury, as are teachers, doctors and members of the armed forces: together, a very significant slice of the higher-attaining segment of the population. Other professionals seem to be able to argue easily they have responsibilities that absolve them from the duty. Others just refuse to go, and nothing seems to happen to them. So juries tend to be composed mostly of lower-skilled employees, housewives and tradespeople.

In cases of cycling deaths caused by bad driving, this is a particularly problematic situation. It amounts to a motorist being tried by other motorists, by, most likely, rat-running school-run mothers and white van men, who probably do believe that cyclists should not really be on the road, and are responsible for the perilous position in which they put themselves. Such jurors likely put themselves in the position of the driver who, though an 'understandable' lapse of attention, has managed to do fatal damage. Drivers who never cycle just perceive the situation on the roads in a very different way to people who do cycle on the roads, those who do cycle on the roads are a small minority of the population, and it really looks like this affects justice in cases of cycle fatalities. As Mark Treasure has pointed out, of 276 drivers involved in fatal cycling collisions between 2007-14, only 80 received a disqualification. 71% were left free to carry on driving. Just imagine it if all cases of personal harm occurring in the course of robberies were tried by juries of thieves. They would obviously tend to let the defendants off, sympathising with them, feeling that 'Theft is just a thing that you do, a way of making a living, and sometimes thing go wrong, and people get hurt, but we can't help that'. This is the tendency in cases of cycling death.

Clearly mine is a deeply cynical view, but I am supported in the idea that in these cases jury trials are not the best way to get justice by Martin Porter QC, who writes with an inside-knowledge of the system (and a background of course as a cyclist, with involvement in many cases of death and injury to cyclists):

Often these juries acquit after less than an hour of deliberation, even when the evidence against the driver seems very strong. 

Why? One reason appears to be that driving offences seem far more likely than other serious crimes to invoke empathy and compassion from a jury. “There but for the grace of God go I” is not a thought likely to cross many jurors’ minds with murder, rape, terrorism or knife crime. But surveys show that a majority of drivers admit to breaking speed limits, and almost all can probably remember a lapse in concentration or worse when in a car.

The jury in the Michel Mason case took only 17 minutes to reach their 'Not Guilty' verdict.

I can't know what the family of Michael Mason have gone through; I have no connection with them. Nothing will bring Michel Mason back, and nothing will bring back all the other cyclists, pedestrians, drivers and car passengers killed by bad, inattentive drivers. I have no great interest in seeing severe punishment of grossly incompetent drivers like Gail Purcell (though I think removing their licences permanently when they kill would be appropriate): what I do have a great interest in is in moving to a situation, where, one way or another, they don't have such common opportunity to kill me when I am on my bike.

I'm not so naive as to believe any campaigning by cycling or road victims' organisations is likely to get the time-honoured British system of trial by jury changed. I also believe general social attitudes to these questions are very unlikely to change in the short-term (by which I mean in my lifetime). Given when sociologists call the 'normative' character of driving in our society, and the likelihood of cycling continuing to be somewhat 'deviant', democracy is never going to be on my side. I therefore tend to attack the problem from a different direction, as readers of this blog will by now know. I want cyclists out of harm's way. We shouldn't have to constantly do the manoeuvre on busy, dangerous streets that Michael Mason was doing when he was killed, pulling out into the path of drivers who may well be so deficient in their perception of their environment that they fail to see us, and they kill us. There are better systems.

A better system, under construction in Enfield (Photo: Brian Deegan)

A bretter system, under construction in Brent (My photo)

A better system, in use in Lambeth (My photo)

The part of Regent Street on which Michael Mason was killed is but yards from the junction where the current design for Cycle Superhighway 11 would terminate its segregated cycling provision, like that shown above, were that scheme to be built. That scheme is currently one of the many cycling schemes put on hold by Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, over the last year, where construction could already have started. If CS11 were to be built according to current plans, of course it would then be highly desirable, and eminently possible, for it to be extended from Portland Place all the way down Regent Street.

My jury is still out on Sadiq Khan and his Cycling and Walking Commissioner Will Norman. If their lengthy period of stasis on new cycle schemes is being used to gestate a grand new strategy of cycle infrastructure provision that will allow the Mayor to spend effectively the substantial sum he has promised to cycling, then the wait will have been worth it. If, however, their delay is due to political timidity, as Andrew Gilligan seems to suspect, then their honeymoon period will soon have run out, and campaigners will have to start shouting loud against them. Recall that by the same stage in the last mayoralty, Gilligan, as Cycling Commissioner, had already announced a visionary programme. And still there had to be a rush of work in the last year of the Johnson mayoralty to ensure a reasonable amount was built (a rush that Khan seems to frequently criticise as 'disruptive'). I'm not attacking Khan, I'm simply looking at the calendar. It's looking increasingly improbable that he will be able to deliver on his promise of tripling the length of segregated Cycle Superhighways in his term, or even come close.

In one of my most popular (or notorious) posts in this blog, Cycling is dangerous, I wrote the following paragraph, which, six years on, and after quite a lot of positive developments for cycling in London, I still feel has much relevance:

People who get on bikes in traffic quickly realise they have no protection other than their own physical capabilities and wits. They discover that they are totally on their own. Nobody and nothing will protect them, not the Highway Code, not the police, not the Crown Prosecution Service, not the courts. And the roads are often designed to make things as dangerous as possible for them. This utterly uncontrolled, socially anomalous danger of cycling is what makes it unique as a legal activity. Being a pedestrian can sometimes have a similar character, but not for so long, as pedestrians are mostly segregated from traffic. Cycling, for a normal activity, that we would hope would be an everyday one, as opposed to a special one like mountaineering or skydiving, is tolerated by our society as uniquely dangerous.

As seeing is an internal, personal perception, which cannot be proved or disproved, by anyone else, so is the subjective feeling of safety or danger. I started this post by referencing Duncan Dollimore's article on the Cycling UK website. How did reading that yesterday make me feel when I went out on my bike today, on my regular journey on one of London's major roads, the A5, which has all the hazards a major UK urban road can have? It made me more worried about my safety, about cycling. I found myself checking my mirror even more than usual (and I usually do it a lot), wondering, as I pulled out into the outside lane to overtake parked cars or stopped buses, as I must, if that motorist behind me is that one in million who has my number, that one whose perception of what is on the road in front of them, in plain view, is so appallingly deficient that they might just continue on the same course and at the same speed to kill me.

That was just my perception, but perceptions matter.

One-eyed justice

The case of Jimmy Savile throws a curiously sidelight on the human condition: that a man during the latter part of his life, and at his death, may be virtually sanctified, as the great giver to charity, the selfless star, loveable eccentric, everybody's favourite uncle, virtually a permanent TV "Father Christmas", a man worthy to name charitable foundations, and streets, after – and then a few months later he can become the devil incarnate, the charities renamed, street signs removed, fancy-dress taken off the shelves, lo, even his own gravestone destroyed.

It is bizarre – because whatever good works he did in his lifetime, and for which he was knighted, they did happen. He wasn't the devil incarnate. He was clearly a deeply-flawed human being. And even if all allegations are true, he wasn't the worst of criminals. Our attitude to child abuse today does border on the hysterical, and this is a historical cultural anomaly which must be corrected in time. Child abuse is a very bad crime, but is not murder, and (as Ruth Sutherland, Director of Relate, said on Radio 4's Any Questions? on Friday) its victims can and do recover, in many cases, to lead happy and productive adult lives. People who are killed, either by malice or carelessness, cannot recover. And the law recognises that child abuse is not the worst of crimes, by not attaching to it the most severe sentence possible in our jurisdiction, life imprisonment (though if the law were written today from scratch, one suspects the hysteria of the times would give a different result).

The fascination with the Savile case, I suspect, is not just due to the institutional implications, not just because we wonder who at the BBC knew, whom of Savile's colleagues and friends knew, why complaints were not taken seriously by numerous authorities, and why Saville was given such unfettered access to vulnerable young people by careless institutions, but because, we can all see, or imagine, now (all of those of use who lived through the period) that we all should have been able to detect it. For Savile, in a way, did not hide his predilections at all – they were perfectly integrated into his personality and image, so being hidden by being so obvious, so blatantly on-show. The way in which he managed this can now be seen, in retrospect, as sheer criminal genius. For anybody could see this elderly man frolicking with young girls on their screens on Top of the Pops. Everybody could see him cosying up to the under-age on Jim'll Fix It. Everybody could see the "inappropriate" (in the words of one of his accusers, from Duncroft School in Surrey) clothing he wore while around young people. But it was all normal for him, it was "just Jimmy", what he did. So he seems to have gotten away with seriously criminal behaviour for a lifetime.

A (female) friend of mine posted on Facebook:

Why is everyone so surprised that Jimmy Savile was never investigated? Every day victims are ignored, police don't investigate, the CPS doesn't charge, juries don't convict and rapists walk free. Roman Polanski has celebrities lining up to defend his actions even though he is a convicted rapist who escaped before he could be sentenced, and the tide of public opinion is still in favour of Julian Assange not to face questioning over allegations made against him.

Indeed (though not to say anything particular about the cases of Polanski or Assange). For though justice is supposed to be "blind", the criminal justice system is actually always one-eyed. It sees crime selectively, only in certain places, and from certain people. It is easy to rewrite the second sentence in that quote from my friend, to refer truly to a different type of crime, and one of particular interest to most followers of this blog:

Every day victims are ignored, police don't investigate, the CPS doesn't charge, juries don't convict and criminal drivers walk free.

Like PC David Lynch, convicted this week of dangerous driving that left London musician Joseph Belmonte with "castrophic injuries", who walked free from court with a suspended sentence. Like Jon Fields, convicted of careless driving that caused the death of cyclist Andrew Hutton in Teeside, who also last month walked free from court: just two recent examples. The latter case also shows how accused motorists' defences can often be incredibly weak, as in Fields' line "He just came out of nowhere" (on a straight road with excellent visibility and no junctions), and yet this does not seem to offset British judges' predilection for derisory punishments in such cases.  Martin Porter, the Cycling Lawyer, notes:

After 9 months, my analysis of careless driving cases is starting to demonstrate how rare immediate custodial sentences are for motorists who kill cyclists. 

The A174 where Andrew Hutton was killed by John Fields

The abused can recover, those killed on the roads through negligent driving cannot. Neither can many of those maimed properly recover. Many will see a difference in intentionality and responsibility when comparing a crime of individual assault on a known person to a (usually) more random one of causing death or injury to a road-user by careless or dangerous driving. But the way that this translates into the procedures of the British justice system as it currently stands mean that most victims of road crime (or their surviving loved-ones) go away feeling profoundly that justice has not been done, and, furthermore, that the deterrent effect of the law is inadequate to prevent tragedies from being repeated.

The Crown Prosecution Service is currently consulting on draft guidance on charging offences arising from driving incidents, and there will be a debate in Parliament on 17 October, in response to campaigning by British Cycling, on how road crime victims are treated by the justice system. This needs to consider all sides of the issue, not just charging. The attitudes and procedures of the police, the Home Office, the CPS, prosecutors, and judges are all part of the jigsaw that goes together to give victims of road crime a very poor deal currently.

As British Cycling say:

It is clear to us that the current justice system often delivers results which send the wrong message about the right of people to ride safely on the roads. Most of our members are car drivers so we do not believe this is a car versus cyclist issue. We believe the review we are calling for is an essential element in building a better culture of mutual respect on the roads where incidents which result in death and injury are treated in a way which is fair to everyone concerned and creates the right incentives for people to behave responsibly.

"It's not a car versus cyclist issue" say British Cycling (driver versus cyclist, surely), but ultimately I suspect that the difficulty in getting justice for cyclists and pedestrians killed and maimed on our roads does revolve around the facts that cyclists are a small minority, and though pedestrains are not a minority, those who are not also car drivers are predominantly from groups such as children, the diabled and elderly, that is, those in positions of lesser power. Drivers are the majority power in the land, and the investigating, prosecuting and sentencing authorities are likely to be more sympathetically at one with them than they are with the victims. Getting justice for minorities has always been difficult, and justice for those in positions of lesser power, as the Savile case shows, is more difficult still.

Dr "Natural Causes" Patel struck off

One piece of good news for the people of North London today must be the long delayed, highly-justified striking off from the medical register of Freddy Patel, long-time pathologist in the Camden area of London, who was associated with so many dubious decisions on causes of death leading to both miscarriages of justice and, in the case of the Camden Ripper, two avoidable murders (avoidable had Patel done his job properly and led police to arrest the murderor, Anthony Hardy, before he killed again). The Guardian:

Freddy Patel, the pathologist who wrongly said Ian Tomlinson died as a result of heart disease, has been struck off the medical register over a catalogue of errors dating back more than a decade. 

A tribunal of the General Medical Council (GMC) said that it had no option but to erase Patel from the register after findings earlier this week of dishonesty as well as incompetence.

Patel, who qualified at the University of Zambia in 1974 and has practised as a pathologist for 35 years, was found guilty of misconduct but was not at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), sitting in Manchester.

Though the focus of the media now is on the last celebrated case in which Patel was a main player, the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson in the G20 protest, in fact this was only one in a long line of seriously flawed examinations carried out by Patel that were familiar to those who followed news in North London over a couple of decades.

In the case of prostitute Sally White, killed by Anthony Hardy, Patel produced a superficial "death by natural causes" decision (heart disease again) despite the most extraordinary and suspicious circumstances of her being found dead and naked on a bed in Hardy's locked flat with cuts and bruises to her head: circumstances that should have obviously caused him to look more carefully at the death. The case was memorable to me because the block of flats was right by the Royal College Street segregated cycle track (which I helped to plan). Hardy's two subsequent victims were found dismembered in pieces, at least in part in the bins behind the pub, the College Arms (now demolished), that stood at the junction of Crowndale Road and Royal College Street, by the cycle-specific traffic lights that feature in this blog post. I rode past there regularly.

In fact, in Camden, in the 1990s and 2000s, every time you read in the local papers of an odd decision on a death, attributing it to "natural causes", be it as a reasult of an assault, a road crash, or some other claimed strange circumstance or accident, there always seemed to be one name at the bottom of the column: Dr Freddy Patel. There was a pattern that the casual observer of the local news could see, even if they had no specialised knowledge. It didn't seem to need an expert investigation by other doctors, it looked obvious that something very strange was going on. This has now been fully confirmed by the General Medical Council:

The Rev Robert Lloyd-Richards, the chairman of the MPTS fitness to practise panel, which heard the case, told Patel he had an "unwarranted confidence" in his ability, "a deep-seated attitudinal problem" and also "lacked insight". 

"Your rigid mind-set, illustrated by your inability to reflect on the case of Mr Tomlinson, and your unwarranted confidence in your own abilities, does not convince this panel that it would be appropriate to impose conditions, even with the most stringent supervision, on your registration," said the written determination from the MPTS.

"The panel considers that you have a deep-seated attitudinal problem."

Patel had tried to cover up his mistakes both in relation to Tomlinson and also to an earlier postmortem, of a woman referred to as Miss E.

He first appeared in front of a professional conduct committee in 2002 and in front of two fitness to practise committees in 2010 and 2011. He had been suspended from working twice.

Patel has actually been investigated over seven cases dating back to 2002, but I suspect there were more that should have been investigated. Why did this take so long? According to The Guardian again:

It has also emerged that, from 2005, the General Medical Council, the doctors' professional body,was examining other allegations of Patel's failings including his part in the notorious case of the Camden Ripper, but was held up by unrelated legal challenges to its investigative and legal authority.

So it's been a thoroughgoing regulatory botch-up, again. Signs that were obvious were not officially acted upon until too much damage had been done.

The Home Office and NPIA [National Police Improvement Agency – strange title for a body] believe measures introduced over the past two years will prevent a repetition of the Patel disaster. That means there is unlikely to be any further official review. The NPIA, which is being abolished under the government's bonfire of the quangos later this year, believes Patel probably only carried out one forensic examination into a death – that of Tomlinson – after June 2007 when it took over running the Home Office's register.

I hope they are right. Meanwhile, we still have the related justice problem of the validity or appropriateness of the system of coroners' verdicts.

Irrational punishment

The riots showed the UK in a bad light, but it looks like the reaction of our politicians and legal system is going to show us in a much worse light.

It appears the the public disgust at the riots is manifesting itself, though some of the judiciary, egged on by politicians, as repressive sentences, for some of those convicted of very minor crimes, that would make the leaders of China or Burma blanch.

The argument I have heard politicians of both major parties put is that these riots were so exceptional and outrageous that exemplary punishments for some of the perpetrators are justified: punishments that go beyond the sentencing norms for the same offences committed in more normal times. I have heard both David Cameron and David Blunkett say this today. But this is an utterly irrational argument.

There are two possible rational arguments, it seems to me, that can be held to in relationship to the crimes committed as part of the riots.

Argument A, the consistency view, is that justice should be blind to extraneous circumstances that have no direct bearing on the actions of the defendant in question. Then they should be sentenced according to the facts of what they actually did, exactly as if their crime had been committed in isolation, with no riot taking place. This would be fair and consistent sentencing.

But there is another rational view, which I will call Argument B, or the contextual view. This is that, if one holds that the riots are to some extent explained by circumstances, that is, they are not random and accidental, but influenced by high levels of unemployment, low levels of attainment, poverty and depravation, then these factors must mitigate the individual culpability of the criminals.

It seems to me that a person who sees lots of other people rioting, breaking windows, and stealing stuff, and, being an easily influenced kind of person, takes the opportunity to lift something from a shop, that they would not have done in normal circumstances, that that person is less culpable than someone who steals the same thing in a normal non-riot circumstance, because the latter person clearly has to have more determination and more ill-intent than the "opportunist" who is swept up in the lawless atmosphere of the rioting. On this contextual view, a given crime committed as part of a riot should be punished less severely than the same crime committed normally. I hold this to be a rational view.

But Judge Andrew Gilbart QC has stated precisely the reverse:

I have no doubt at all that the principal purpose is that the courts should show that outbursts of criminal behaviour like this will be and must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation.

Gilbart handed down sentences of 18 and 16 months in prison respectively to a man who had been given a looted TV to put in his car, and a man who had found and walked off with a bag of clothes. These crimes would normally be punished with a community sentence.

If it is true that what we are seeing in the wake of the riots is "a distorted version of our normal system" of justice, as BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman suggests, then this is very grave. It suggests that justice is not being done, and this is more a cause for national shame, in my book, than the riots themselves. For Britain has always held itself up to be a model of the rule of law and of impartial and fair justice above all else (though this never seems to have extended to road crimes). Some of the sentences do indeed suggest that we are slipping into a state of repression.

Comparing some sentences that have been imposed for the "Facebook"-type riot inciting-crimes, in cases where the perpetrator has not actually done anything violent, with some imposed recently for killing using a motor vehicle, may lead one to conclude that we have an utterly irrational sentencing regime that values human life very low indeed. Some examples:

Afzaal Kahn found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving in October 2009 – sentence: two and a half years in prison (plus 5 years driving ban)

Keisha Wall found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving in February 2010 – sentence: two and a half years in a young offenders institution

Tony Smith admitted causing death by careless driving in August 2010 – sentence: 100 hours community service (plus one year driving ban)

Jill Corps admitted killing a cyclist though careless driving in February – sentence: 180 hours community service (plus one year driving ban)

Aryelis Angelis found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving in June – sentence: 8 months in prison (plus 2 years driving ban)

Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan admitted "encouraging crime" in Northwich by posting a Facebook message last week suggesting there should be a riot there. Neither had any other part in disorder, and there was no riot in Northwich. Sentence – both got 4 years in prison. Nobody died, no-one was even hurt, no property was stolen or damaged as a result of these two men's actions. But they have been punished far more harshly than all of the killers listed above. All they did was to type some text on to the internet; one wonders how much the judge who imposed this sentence knows about what goes on on Facebook and the rest of the internet normally.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles has said "exemplary sentences" were necessary and that people needed to understand the consequences of rioting, looting and disorder. This argument never seems to be applied to killer drivers. But then Pickles is a man with odd views. He thinks cyclists are people who "pedal up and down in rubber knickers".

The riots have created a clamour for extraordinary and senseless, disproportionate punishments, particularly when contrasted with the permanently light-touch approach of British law to the avoidable slaughter that goes on daily on our roads. Whether our courts resist this clamour or not is a test of our level of civilisation. We are not doing well so far.