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Driver who killed cyclist escapes jail sentenceJustice (Lonpicman, Wikimedia Commons)

Driver who killed cyclist escapes jail sentence

Community service for driver who hit cyclist from behind at 2am
by John Stevenson
Tue, Aug 26, 2014 13:15
37

A man convicted of causing the death of a cyclist by careless driving has walked free from a Scottish court after being handed a sentence of 300 hours community service and a four-year driving ban.

Alastair Dudgeon died after being hit by James Sneddon's Vauxhall Astra at about 2am on January 6, 2013 near the Kincardine Bridge in Fife.

According to The Scotsman's Dave Finlay, the High Court in Edinburgh was told on Monday that Mr Dudgeon, from High Valleyfield, Fife, regularly cycled to and from his work as a baker at a Tesco store in Camelon, on the outskirts of Falkirk.

He sustained a broken neck, rib fractures and internal injuries, including to the aorta — the main artery from the heart — when he was hit from behind by Sneddon.

Sneddon denied the charge of causing death by dangerous driving, and was found guilty of the lesser offence of causing death by careless driving.

One witness told the court that weather conditions were clear and visibility was reasonable even though the riad was not lit.

A police constable estimated he could see the flashing rear light on Dudgeon's bike from about 200 metres away as he drove to the scene.

Prosecuting, advocate depute Bruce Erroch reminded the court that the Highway Code told drivers to give motorcyclists, cyclists and horse riders at least as much room as when overtaking a car.

He told jurors that if they thought Mr Dudgeon had contributed in some way to his death by not wearing a high-visibility jacket, that was not something that absolved Sneddon. He said what mattered was that the driver should have seen Dudgeon well before the collision and taken steps to avoid him.

Defence counsel Emma Toner said Sneddon had expressed genuine remorse for having been the cause of Dudgeon's family's loss.

Sentencing Sneddon, judge Nigel Morrison said: “The death of Alastair Dudgeon at the age of 51 is a tragedy for his family.”

Mr Dudgeon’s widow was “devastated” by the loss, he said, but he was taking into accoount the lack of aggravating factors such as deliberate course of bad driving, drinking or using a mobile phone.

He noted that Sneddon had been assessed as posing a very low risk of re-offending.

Sneddon's sentence is within the recommended sentencing range (see page 15) for causing death through careless or inconsiderate driving arising from momentary inattention with no aggravating factors.

Causing death by careless driving
Fatality
Alastair Dudgeon
James Sneddon
John Stevenson

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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37 comments

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userfriendly replied to truffy | 10 years ago
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truffy wrote:
userfriendly wrote:

Once again, the church of the holy motor car prevails. How little regard for human life these people have. Disgusting thugs, the lot of them.

Seriously, where the hell do you get that from? A lot of us are motorists as well as cyclists. 14

I'm sorry, were you the judge or a member of the jury? Or why are you so curiously inclined to feel addressed by the "these people" above?

Avatar
brooksby replied to userfriendly | 10 years ago
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userfriendly wrote:
truffy wrote:
userfriendly wrote:

Once again, the church of the holy motor car prevails. How little regard for human life these people have. Disgusting thugs, the lot of them.

Seriously, where the hell do you get that from? A lot of us are motorists as well as cyclists. 14

I'm sorry, were you the judge or a member of the jury? Or why are you so curiously inclined to feel addressed by the "these people" above?

To play devils advocate here, I think that truffy was querying the conclusion that someone who kills while driving is automatically a disgusting thug with little regard for human life.

I personally think the bloke was clearly completely and dangerously incompetent and shouldn't be allowed to drive anything more powerful than a large lawnmower for the rest of his life, but we haven't been told that he intentionally drove into the back of the victim, and don't actually know that he is a disgusting thug with little regard for human life, do we?

It sounds more like he is just (probably, IMO, and in no way defending him) a completely and dangerously incompetent fool, whose actions led to someone's death. And, unfortunately, there are way more of them than there are intentionally murderous drivers....

Avatar
userfriendly replied to brooksby | 10 years ago
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brooksby wrote:

To play devils advocate here, I think that truffy was querying the conclusion that someone who kills while driving is automatically a disgusting thug with little regard for human life.

I personally think the bloke was clearly completely and dangerously incompetent and shouldn't be allowed to drive anything more powerful than a large lawnmower for the rest of his life, but we haven't been told that he intentionally drove into the back of the victim, and don't actually know that he is a disgusting thug with little regard for human life, do we?

It sounds more like he is just (probably, IMO, and in no way defending him) a completely and dangerously incompetent fool, whose actions led to someone's death. And, unfortunately, there are way more of them than there are intentionally murderous drivers....

That's fair enough. To make it unmistakably clear, as I probably should have done in the first place: I was referring to judge and jury in this case. The sentencing guidelines are a joke already, and seeing that judges go for the absolute low end of even those ridiculous guidelines on a regular basis, for reasons that likely amount to nothing more than 'it could have happened to anyone', 'act of god', is ... well, if not disgusting, what is it then?

It's this self-serving and problem avoidant approach to sentencing clearly guilty drivers that is part of the reason why there is actually a large number of people out there on the roads that think nothing of putting someone at risk to avoid being held up by the fraction of a second it would take to change lane as the highway code unmistakably demands for any sort of overtake manoeuvre.

"It's just a bike!", "I'm a good driver!", "Get off the road!" - sentencing like this one only cements this attitude. Motorists' unbridled progress and the "right to drive" is worth more than a person's life - that is what this sentence is telling us.

And it sickens me.

Avatar
brooksby replied to userfriendly | 10 years ago
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userfriendly wrote:

It's this self-serving and problem avoidant approach to sentencing clearly guilty drivers that is part of the reason why there is actually a large number of people out there on the roads that think nothing of putting someone at risk to avoid being held up by the fraction of a second it would take to change lane as the highway code unmistakably demands for any sort of overtake manoeuvre.

"It's just a bike!", "I'm a good driver!", "Get off the road!" - sentencing like this one only cements this attitude. Motorists' unbridled progress and the "right to drive" is worth more than a person's life - that is what this sentence is telling us.

And it sickens me.

No, it is disgusting, and I completely agree with you.

It is problematic (to be generous) that the courts really seem to be creating an environment where people clearly can get away with causing the death of someone (whether maliciously or by incompetence) to a degree that wouldn't happen if the circumstances were not "the deceased was riding a bicycle, the perpetrator was driving a motor vehicle".

I really don't want to have to use a headcam just to be able to prove what happened if I got knocked off.

I really don't want to have to dress up like a highlighter pen and have more lights'n'reflectors than a christmas tree, just so the person who runs me down can't reasonably say SMIDSY (or if they do, they will look like a total f-ing idiot).

And I really don't want to cycle to and from work knowing that if some impatient a**e in a two-ton SUV gets ticked off, they can run me down from the front, side, or back, at whatever speed, and it still looks like they only *might* get some jail time and *might* have their licence withdrawn.

"Gosh well it could happen to anyone" really isn't a valid excuse for sentencing - fair enough that he has expressed remorse, etc etc, and "it could happen to anyone", but he should have his driving licence withdrawn indefinitely. There are other ways of getting to work, you know...

Avatar
sean1 | 10 years ago
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Mr Sneddon was travelling at 40mph (according to the newspaper report) when the collision occurred so the relative speed of Mr Dudgeon and Mr Sneddon would be about 30mph, and his rear light was visible from 200m.

In which case Mr Sneddon would have had 15 seconds in which to see Mr Dudgeon (assuming the road is mainly straight).

15 seconds is a long time to be not looking where you are going and beyond the "momentary inattention" that careless driving refers to.

In this case the CPS did pursue a charge of dangerous driving, but it was dumbed down by the jury. No doubt they had sympathy for the driver, it could have been them.....

And the judge backs this up with a suitably dumbed down sentence.

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notfastenough | 10 years ago
0 likes

Anyone know what the speed limit was? 60mph equates to 26.8 metres per second - even if the cyclist was stationary and the car driver doing 60, this equates to nearly 8 seconds in which the flashing rear light was visible (as per the '200 metre' statement by the attending PC). How is it even possible to take your eyes off the road for nearly 8 seconds and expect to not come to grief?

If the limit (and the car driver's speed) was 30mph, and the cyclist travelling in the same direction at 12mph, then he would have more like 25 seconds to see him.

Avatar
rswift | 10 years ago
0 likes

We live in a fucked up world... 33 months behind bars for making an illegal copy of a film, about driving. None, for actually driving and taking a life?

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