I don’t want to hijack the Desreen’s Rule post, but I was reading Benjamin Brooks-Hutton’s blog and there is one thing he says (as do some of the commentators) which he (and the commentators) are absolutely and utterly wrong about.
If an elderly driver is found guilty of dangerous driving – and especially if they cause death by dangerous driving – they deserve to go to jail for it. This is even more true if they purposely lied in order to stay on the roads.
I’m sorry, Ben, but they do. They are as guilty as a 17-year old would be. And they deserve a sentence of the same duration as the 17-year old would get.
Geoffrey Lederman showed no remorse, and made every attempt to get out of being prosecuted (causing even more pain than would otherwise have been experienced by Ben Hutton). Although little has been made of it, he claimed to have had “an episode” – in my books, given the evidence and the outcome of the trial, that is what is known in the civilised world as “a lie”. A straightforward case therefore took over two years to be dealt with. Lederman could have been put away for 14 years, but he got a very modest 18 months.
Mr Hutton is obviously still struggling to come to terms with what happened, whereas Lederman is almost certainly now back on the streets again (or will be within weeks). Since we know he tried to get out of the charges and showed no remorse, it doesn’t take much to imagine how he’s doing at the moment – and I’d lay odds that it’s not as bad for him as it is for Mr Hutton. Nor should Mr Hutton forget that Lederman came within millimetres of killing both him and his son, not to mention the fact that he ruined the life of Amy Werner, and very nearly the lives of five more pedestrians who he didn’t see (though I suspect that what they witnessed has hardly left their lives untarnished).
Lederman deserved to go to jail. He is very, very lucky he didn’t go there for longer.