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Justice (Lonpicman, Wikimedia Commons)Texting van driver cleared of responsibility for death of 18-year-old cyclist
A driver who admitted exchanging texts with his girlfriend before his van hit and killed an 18-year-old cyclist has been cleared of causing death by dangerous driving, and of causing death by careless driving.
Philip Sinden was driving the Vauxhall Vivaro that hit and killed 18-year-old triathlete Daniel Squire on the A258 at Ringwould in Kent at around 8:40am on September 7 2013.
After the verdict, the family of Daniel Squire shouted at the jury: “Were you not listening?”, “What a waste of time” and “I can’t believe that”, reports Kent Online's Paul Hooper.
During the trial the court heard that Sinden had sent 19 texts and received 22 from his girlfriend between 6.07am and 8.32am. He and his girlfriend continued texting until she sent a message at 8.39.49. He was alleged to have composed a message at around 8.40am which was never sent.
Prosecutor Dale Sullivan said: “The defendant had been using his mobile phone either just before or at the time of the impact and he failed to react to the presence of Daniel who was in front of his vehicle until the very last moment.”
But Sinden claimed that he had not been distracted by using his phone.
“I was texting just using my left hand. When I pulled out onto the road I was trying to keep my attention on the road, so I typed without looking at the phone.”
He claimed Daniel Squire had unexpectedly joined the carriageway from the pavement.
“I realised it was a cyclist on the pavement on my left hand side. He started to come off the pavement and I started to react. I started to brake and steer around the cyclist.
“It was all very quick but it seemed to me he had adjacened [sic] out slightly from the lane he should have been on.”
Sinden told the jury that Daniel had turned around and looked behind him “just before it [the van] struck the bike”.
“He just came out more than I expected. I spiked my brakes," he said.
Members of Daniel Squire's family attended every day of the trial at Canterbury Crown Court.
Judge Heather Norton expressed her “profound sympathy” for Daniel's family.
She told them: “I appreciate that is not the verdict you were expecting and was not the verdict you were hoping for.”
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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82 comments
As Wardy74 says, the problem is the jury system in UK courts is farcical. Time and again we have nonsensical outcomes from trials. The anniversary of Magna Carta is the right moment to consign juries to history and allow panels of judges to determine the outcome of trials. It won't be perfect, but it will surely be better.
This is what happens when you have a jury that hates cyclists and sees them as a nuisance who should not be on the road.
when this kind of tragedy happens to someone with some
power then things will change ... until then we are, apparently,
expendable ...
Something puzzles me. To quote the article above...
"He claimed Daniel Squires had unexpectedly joined the carriageway from the pavement.
“I realised it was a cyclist on the pavement on my left hand side. He started to come off the pavement and I started to react. I started to brake and steer around the cyclist."
...My puzzlement is this - What pavement?
As far as I can remember there is NO pavement on the A258 anywhere near Station Road. How can a cyclist come off a pavement that isn't there? I am of course making the assumption that by pavement they mean footway beside a road. More importantly, why wasn't this challenged in court?
This has to be appealed!
Street view on the stretch of road is dated May 2014 (here) allows us to find the spot where the accident happened. A very narrow piece of pavement begins by the Ringwould sign while travelling from Dover towards Deal - I assume this is the "pavement" that Daniel came off into the road. If you step forward on street view you can see the memorial where the accident happened.
A few things ....
1. Why on earth would he have chosen to ride on that very narrow strip of pavement only to dismount after a few yards when there had been no pavement on his journey before that ?
2. He was training for an Iron Man. did he have had some kind of GPS or time recording device or even a smart phone with Strava etc ?
3. Did anyone seek to match the contents of the recording device with the drivers story ? He may have been on the pavement for a phone stop or to fix a puncture in which case the timer would show a gap in the recording points or a period of not moving and match the drivers story. Without a device to disprove the drivers story I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that would have chosen to cycle on that bit of pavement. It doesn't make sense.
4. I live in Canterbury (where the case was tried). Local cycling group SPOKES attended and will be compiling a report of the trial.
5. I really hope the CPS / prosecuting authorities considered why he would have been on that pavement - to me it really makes no sense. If he had a puncture or mechanical then there would probably be witnesses to say they had seen him stopped.
I suggest the pavement story may not have been challenged either because there weren't any experienced cyclists involved on the CPS side or simply that they didn't look that closely at the scene.
I recently did jury service and I can honestly say that the CPS in the case were completely incompetent. They did very little to corroborate stories, vital evidence was missing, etc etc. In the lunch room we overheard other jurors talking about how incompetent their CPS were... I think it's a trend...
Yeah - it looks as if there's a dangerous lack of expertise in prosecuting these cases, because prosecuting lawyers aren't themselves cyclists (and nor is the judge and most of the jury).
Surely the jury should have been shown pictures of that 'pavement', or, better yet, taken there and asked to try and cycle along it themselves!
Also I think there should be efforts made to ensure juries are genuinely representative, not just 'peers' of the accused but also 'peers' of the victim.
The question HAS to be asked, why, unlike the convention for most trials where death or serious injury has taken place, was there NO SITE VISIT made by the Court so that the judge & jury could appraise the evidence and statements with a clear knowledge of the crash site and other road details relevant to the case.
We must also question WHO or WHAT set the requirement to EXCLUDE FROM THE JURY:
ANY PERSON LIVING WITIN 2 MILES OF THE CRASH SITE OR REGULARLY USING THE A 258
ANY PERSON WITH THE MOST REMOTE LINK TO DANIEL - IE BEYOND FAMILY AND FRIENDS.
The exclusion of close relatives and friends is an expected caveat but the latter seems a bit excessive and does not appear to be matched by a similar caveat applied to the defendant. Were these conditions initiated through the petitioning of the defence team?
More & more detail is emerging which suggests serious omissions and statements made which cannot be substantiated by a factual analysis most notably the claim to have covered 1.2 miles in under 50 seconds from standing start to stopped after the crash, driving legally (NB 1 mile in 60 seconds = driving at legal limit passing start & finish point at 60mph)
Around 20 years ago STV staged a rear end crash using a remote controlled car and crash test dummy set up on a bike. Their crash analysis engineers were able to highlight the damage to the car delivered at an impact speed of 27.3mph, both to the car and to the 'victim'
Particularly noticable was the damage that an 60-100Kg adult can do when given the destructive energy of a 30mph or greater impact (15 KJ of energy has to be turned into the breaking of a body and damage to a car) converting that in half a second or less puts over 30KW of power into the damage process.
That's the first detail I've seen about the hitherto enigmatic jury oddities. Thanks. What's the provenance of that information?
Here's a synopsis of what happened with the selection of the jury. Remember that the original date of the trial had already been postponsed by 12 months. I would have expected the judge, who was been based at Canterbury for 3 years, to take a little bit of time prior to the case to examine the geography of the area around the collision site as this was a "death on the road."
1. The judge indicated that regular users of those road should be excluded from the panel - what does regular mean? Most drivers who live in that area would use this road!
2. The judge then indicated that jurors who lived within a certain radius of the collision site should also be excused from duty.
She then named Ringwould and St. Margaret’s as the two places of exclusion, thus demonstrating her lack of local knowledge.
Upper Walmer, Ripple and Kingsdown are closer to the site than St. Margaret’s. The exclusion zone was changed to a specific radius of 2 miles rather than the two named places.
All very arbitrary, rushed and not thought through.
And no vetting of the jurors to show that they met these criteria.
Why weren't jurors who have been caught using mobile 'phones, but not given a criminal conviction, excluded?
.Why weren't jurors who have been caught speeding in the area, but not given a criminal conviction, excluded?
That information was recorded by observers at the trial
A pavement of sorts starts right where Dan was treated, but it is not rideable no dip to mount, probably less than a foot wide and is covered in debris and mud. Given the short distance I wouldn't be surprised if the impact was before it's start where there isn't even a verge. Seems the drivers story changed a number of times with nothing he said adding up which makes the verdict extremely hard to take. Cannot begin to understand what his family must be feeling.
Time to take cases like this out of a jury's hands. The evidence is obvious, there was no disputing what he did or what he was doing. It should be just a technical summing up of what happened. Guilty forever!!!
Wow. So the Police provide evidence of phone use prior to and right up to the incident, AND the driver admits it, but the Jury still find him not guilty?!
What if he'd hit and killed a child - this sends an awesome message 'Texting while driving, it's okay by us' FFS
Book me a ticket off this rock.
He did hit and kill somebody's child.
Words fail me
texting in left hand but not distracted? can he text without looking???? WTF!
He was texting, which means he could not have been concentrating 100% on the road. He was composing a message, picturing what it looked like as he typed (if indeed he was capable of doing so without looking at the phone). So he was in no position to think about what he was seeing or anticipate. So when something happens, it is all down to his subconscious ringing an alarm, his being dragged back to the real world and starting to react.
I wasn't there, so cannot say to what extent he might have anticipated the cyclist's wishing to rejoin the carriageway and thus have given him room before he did so; but in my opinion, texting or using a mobile phone while driving is dangerous driving. That is why they are illegal (except talking using a hands-free kit, which IMHO is also dangerous). On my commute I pass a nursery and primary school, at a time when parents are dropping off at the roadside and entering and leaving the school driveway. It is very busy and hazardous, but incredibly I see people on their phones as they drive past, seemingly oblivious to the danger and the consequences of any slowness to react to a toddler deciding to give their mother's hand the slip. If their mind was on the job, they would slow right down and be obviously vigilant. The fact that they aren't shows how distracting using a phone is.
I haven't seen the court transcripts, but is it not a huge coincidence that the driver's use of a phone immediately preceded the death of another road user in a collision with his vehicle that he failed to avoid? If the judge regarding the charge of death by dangerous driving to be unproven, why was he not convicted of dangerous driving?
[quote=arowland
I wasn't there, so cannot say to what extent he might have anticipated the cyclist's wishing to rejoin the carriageway and thus have given him room before he did so;[/quote]
This is the drivers story the foot path (if you can call it that) actually starts where the accident occurs, it is a foot wide a most covered in dirt and debris and in the couple of metres between is start and the accident there I'd no dip to mount the pavement. If you saw the crash site believe me you would not believe this event - shocked if no photos were shown to disprove the drivers story.
Soooo, he admits using his phone whilst driving and still no conviction. I think the jury should have an IQ test
Honestly, what is the point. Just get rid of these offences, there's seemingly no point charging anyone with them.
Its so depressingly absurd, and even more depressingly common place.
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