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Car involved in Nottingham hit and run (taken from YouTube video).jpgPolice say horrific Nottingham hit-and-run resulted in £150 fine
Police have said that there was not enough evidence to prosecute the driver of a hire car who was captured on video accelerating into the back of a cyclist in Nottingham. The victim said he sustained a severe back injury and internal haemorrhaging in the shocking hit-and-run incident, but Nottinghamshire Police said they could not prove who was driving.
The car was a hire vehicle that had been sub-leased through a number of different companies. The BBC reports that a 54-year-old man who was eligible to drive it received six penalty points and a £150 fine for failing to provide driver details.
Failing to provide driver details is an offence contrary to Section 172(3) of the Road Traffic Act 1988. The penalty is a fine of up to £1000 and the endorsement of 6 penalty points (with the possibility of disqualification).
Sam Jones, CTC Campaign Coordinator, said the case was being looked at by the organisation’s Cyclists’ Defence Fund, which works to raise awareness of the law relating to cycling and offers help with legal cases.
“We’re now aware of the Police’s reporting of their investigation, and will follow up accordingly. CTC’s Cyclist Defence Fund has been in touch with Reginald Scot and we are now looking into how we can help him find justice for this awful incident.
“Considering the seriousness of the injury and how blatant the offence, this is very weak from the court not to have imposed the maximum penalty on the unnamed Nottingham man who failed to provide the driver’s details.”
Interestingly, despite only one person being charged, police said that two people had been traced who were eligible to drive the car. Both were issued with a formal request to provide the driver's details, but did not respond.
The two possible drivers were subsequently interviewed and summonsed to court for failing to stop at the scene of an accident, failing to report an accident and failing to respond to a legal request for driver details.
After reviewing the evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove who was driving when the collision took place. The prosecutions for failing to stop and failing to report were consequently dropped.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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78 comments
I think I'm getting criminal/tort/civil mixed up - but what is it they do in a huge chunk of Europe?
Some form of presumed liability for civil law. Basically it means that the starting point is for the driver's insurance to pay for medical care, bike damage etc for the cyclist. That's displaced if it's not the driver's fault.
And here is the link to the petition to change the law so that failure to provide driver details would be punishable with the same penalty as the main offence, thereby making it harder to pull the same trick that this pair appear (based on what I read here and on my experience of similar cases) to have pulled.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/120623/#sthash.lN72w823.dpuf
Here's the post I put up the other day explaining things in nice short words for the pitchfork brigade:
Basically it's as anybody with knowledge of the law would assume:
1. It's a hire car.
2. The police did what they should have done and served a s172 notice, requiring the hire company to tell them who hired it.
3. The car had been hired out to a man but with two permitted drivers: him and a female. They were also served with s172 notices requiring them to say which had been driving.
4. They declined to say who had been driving. This is obviously extremely reprehensible. Note that at this point the fact of its being a hire car becomes irrelevant. It is exactly the same situation as if my car hits somebody (or just goes througha red light/speed camera) and my wife and I refuse to say which of us was driving.
5. A few people have said that the failure to find out who it was shows that the police either don't care or are incompetent. This is simply wrong. It is conceivable (likely, in fact) that the car went outside the view of CCTV. In any event the police would not have gone to CCTV until it became apparent that the car was a hire and the hirer wasn't complying. Doing so would have been a complete waste of resources as most people do comply. By the time they got that far it is likely that any CCTV other than city council would have been wiped - most provate companies keep their CCTV for short periods only, to save space. You can only check out an alibi if they give one - they may not have done so.
6. The same goes for mobile phone positioning, with the added complication that it is very difficult and very expensive to do a precise triangulation of mobile phone position. The bit that can be done relatively easily is call data. That just shows you which cells were used and this is not sufficient to say exactly where you were (it can be a range of several kilometers). It also only works if you are actually using your phone at the time. Anything beyond that rough position requires very time-consuming and expensive work. By which I mean that police resources are such that it is very rare to get it in cases like organised burglary and drug dealing gangs. This does not mean that the police don't care about this case or about cycling generally. It means that they do not have infinite resources. Add complications like showing who had which phone at the time (basically impossible in some cases) and the decision not to go down that route is entirely right.
7. Both were summonsed for failing to stop, failing to report and failing to respond to their s172 notices. The CPS (rightly) took the view that there was no prospect of conviction on the failing to stop and failing to report for exactly the same reason that there is no prospect of a conviction for dangerous driving: it is impossible to identify the driver. This, by the way, is not the CPS being incompetent of uncaring or a bunch of car drivers who cyclists. It's the CPS applying the law.
8. The male (presumably it was he who hired the car) was convicted of failing to answer the s172 notice. The female doesn't appear to have been convicted, which makes sense - she would only be lawfully required to reply if she was the driver. Since we would only have the male's word for that, she wouldn't be convicted (the Prosecution not being able to rely on a Defendant's word in their case).
9. The male was fined £150. This is shockingly low. The maximum is £1000. This low fine is not the fault of the police or the CPS. It is a decision taken my magistrates. They have sentencing guidelines that they have to pay heed to but are free to excedd in appropriate case. Personally I would have thought that this justified a higher fine but I (like everybody else here) don't know the details of what led to the decision, so cannot say for certain.
10. The male received 6 penalty points. This is the maximum penalty in terms of driving punishment. The fact that this is the maximum is not the fault of the police, CPS or Magistrates. It is the fault of the Parliament of 1988 that passed the Road Traffic Act and of every Parliament since that has not increased it.
11. Personally I feel that the penalty for willfully failing to provide details should be the same as the penalty for whatever offence the unidentified driver committed. It isn't. If those who are talking about writing to MPs want to put something useful in their letters, leave aside calls for expensive infrastructure and education that will probably be ignored. Write and suggest an amendment to make wilfully failing to supply driver details punishable with the same penalty as the offence that the driver committed. That's the actual lesson from this case.
This is not a case, as far as the reports show, where the police have been lazy, incompetent or uncaring about cyclists. Nor have the CPS. The only reprehensible behaviour has been by the driver and possibly by the other eligible driver (I say possibly because it may be that each said it was the other, in which case the non-driver has done nothing wrong). And possibly the court sentenced too low but really would a £1000 fine have reduced the justifiable sense of injustice here?
It is also a case that highlights a problem with the current legislation. That is not something that can be fixed by the police, the CPS or the courts. It needs a Bill in Parliament.
how about aiding and abetting? one of them committed a crime, they both know which one, therefore surely they must both be complicit in aiding and abetting?
p.s my law knowledge is from silent witness and spooks, not the wire.
There are still problems. As a general rule you cannot be guilty of an offence by mere inaction. There are exceptions but not that many. There is no law that says you have to help the police. There have been calls to change that (such as when people appear to shield those who are suspected of abducting children) but that is the state of the law. So if they simply refused to answer when asked who was driving then you're stuck.
Alternatively, they may each have blamed the other. It's hard to say that X is helping Y if X is actually saying "Y was the driver". If Y is saying that X is the driver, however, it's very difficult to know where to go. A jury have to be sure that a particular defendant was driving. If it's one person's word against the other's then that's very difficult to achieve.
As a technicality, even if you could show that they were conspiring together, the best you could do would be conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. But that requires proof of an actual agreement. It may be that you could make that stick but without knowing exactly what each said in interview neither I nor anybody else can say.
Or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice?
I have no legal knowledge whatsoever.
I also hadn't read all the comments , e.g. when Dan answers this precise point...
Sigh. Another case where suddenly everybody is an expert not only on what should be done but also on what was actually done. I'll copy a fairly comprehensive run down of the situation in a moment, together with a link to a petition for a change in the law rather more sensible than the usual "hang all car drivers" that gets spouted in the comments section.
First, a couple of quick points:
a. there would be no prospect whatsoever of a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. That's because there exists no such offence at English law. If you get your legal knowledge from American TV then you should probably not be making assertions of law. It's not going to be helpful. Leave that sort of thing to people with a clue.
b. The same is true about technology. Unless you are actually an expert on mobile phone cell site evidence then your assertion that it could definitely be used to find out which of two people was driving a particular car at a particular time is really not very valuable. As with most forms of evidence, the actual answer is that it might help but no more than that.
c. This article does not purport to list every step that the police took in investigating the offence. Unless you actually have inside knowledge of the investigation then comments saying that the p[olice didn't do this or that or were too lazy or didn't care are all utterly worthless. We do not know whether the police tried cell site evidence. We don't know whether the car was returned damaged. We don't know whether they tried fingerprints or DNA. We don't know what the people said in interview, whether they provided alibis, whether any alibis stood up etc etc. You can presume all you like but please don't think that your brilliant theory on what the police actually did or thought is actually worth the energy it took to type it.
d. Finally, a point on the usual tired comments about the police and/or CPS not caring about cyclists. If you think that then you may need to reappraise your notion of the word "think". Do you honestly believe that there are no cyclists in the police or CPS? Do you have some reason to suggest that cycling is less prevalent in those organisations than in the general populace? The last case I was involved in included a CPS lawyer who cycles, a lead investigator who does Ironman triathlons and a police sergeant who everested in the South Downs last year. My local CPS contains at least two triathletes and at least 3 or 4 others who cycle most days. Neither the police nor the CPS is some faceless body of evil masterminds who want all cyclists to die, nor are they comprised entirely of lazy jobsworths who don't care about actual people's lives. There are good, bad and average police officers and CPS staff, just as there are in any other profession.
There is only one sense in which the police and CPS "don't care about cyclists" and it's this: the fact that a person is a cyclist makes absolutely no difference to their attitude, generally speaking. If you are a victim of crime then the fact you are on a bike makes you vulnerable in just the same way that you would be if you were walking, running or skateboarding. It doesn't make you a top priority and it doesn't make you somehow not matter. You're not special just because you ride a bike.
Cheers Dan. The petition is being reviewed currently so I'll pop back to sign it, but as it's been written by somebody with a grasp of the relevant legal principles, I'm confident it will hit the right notes. Could be worth a regular bump to get some support. The current situation is nonsensical.
I think the source of frustration in many of the comments is that you're right. That fact is incongruous with:
- the noise about a 'cycling revolution' and green transport and obesity crises and suchlike that is regularly spouted by the people who claim to run the country
- the evidence on what constitutes efficient urban transport and how our cities are designed,
- and the level of perceived risk (and actual risk in the event of minor collisions) that a cyclist vs driver experiences during a typical journey.
There is a strong argument for cyclists being treated as a bit more 'special' than they are currently.
Fancy whipping up a petition for (criminal) strict liability?
There is indeed, but the police and CPS (who seem to be the instant points of blame by ill-informed ranters here) have to deal with the situation as it is. The law does not make allowances for the rhetoric of politicians (and nor should it).
No, absolutely not. True strict liability ("your car and a cyclist had a collision therfore you as the driver are criminally liable") would be hideously unjust. The simple fact is that sometimes it's the cyclist's fault. When I was starting out I nearly had several accidents through my own fault: wobbling about as I tried to get my bidon into an unfamiliar cage; nearly coming off when trying aero bars for the first time and misjudging my speed and braking power on a descent that finshes at a major roundabout (I actually stopped about 4ft onto the roundabout but there were no cars coming). Others may have seen the footage taken on a car's rearview camera of a cyclist going full gas, head down and simply riding into the back of the properly parked car.
Worse, I have dealt with a case where a driver was prosecuted for knocking a cyclist off her bike and killing her. The police expert evidence, together with video footage, revealed that the lady on the bike (riding along a dual carriageway where there are signs saying not to cycle) had wobbled some 2ft into the main carriageway. The road at that point curves in such a way that reconstruction footage showed that a driver in heavy traffic (as this was) would not see the cyclist until the car in front passed her. He was not too close to the car in front and was doing no more than 50 (perfectly safe and the same as those around him). The police expert agreed under cross-examination that the driver had reacted (based on the skid marks and reconstructed speed) quite a bit faster than the average driver would have done and that he could not have done more to avoid the crash. Strict liability would have been utterly unjust.
There are other technicalities such as what happens if the driver denies that there was a crash or (as in Nottingham) you have a dispute as to who was driving? What's the liability there?
The alternative is presumed liability. This has the same basic problems as strict liability but with the additional problem that it often turns juries against it. You need to work within the system and if you take a bunch of jurors and tell them that they should presume somebody guilty unless they can show otherwise then they really don't like it.
Other people who don't like it include the higher courts, the European Court of Human Rights and victims of every other offence where the burden isn't reversed. There are already calls to reverse the burden of proof in rape cases, so that the moment a woman accuses a man of rape he has to prove he didn't do it. If we change it for cyclists then lots of other offences call out for it (including pedestrians hit by cyclists).
The current system is by no means perfect but it's better than a lot of the alternatives!
I would say it's rather more than that. In this case, the video shows (appears to show) the car following the cyclist for some distance, then, on a straight road, suddenly speeding up and hitting him. If I walked some distance behind someone, them suddenly pushed them to the floor and walked over them you'd be hard pressed to believe it was accidental. The same is true here. Regardless of the legal issues, it feels as though the driver has got away with not merely bad driving, but a deliberate attack.
As a non driving cyclist i do indeed feel 'special' - I feel quite often that driving which is utterly incompetent, and often illegal, is simply ignored, and that even when the consequences are severe it's treated as accidental, which it is clearly not. No, I don't mean in the sense of 'intending to hurt' (not so sure in this specific case, but not generally , I agree), but in the sense that the original bad driving was conscious and voluntary. Treating such behaviour as 'accidental' seems ridiculous.
What a stupid system!!!! The law should state that if you refuse to divulge who was driving (in this case it was surely the person in question in any case) then you automatically receive the full punishment, without trial, that would be due to the perpetrator if found guilty. In that way there would be no benefit of refusing to cooperate in the knowledge it will result in a lesser sentence.
We have reached new lows with this. Seriously WTF? Drivers just ignoring legal requests to provide details and the outcome is a fine equivalent to a London parking ticket?!
As for the endorsement we know that'll achieve piss all with drivers kicking about with 50+ points whinging about 'hardship'.
This is attempted murder, do the same with a crowbar in the high street and it's taken seriously...as ever use a car and it's a big joke.
I want the PM, head of CPS and the local Chief Constable on the TV explaining to the nations cyclists why they don't give a toss.
So fed up with this 'we want to encourage cycling' spin when the establishment clearly hates it. Something has to give and now.
So the outturn of all this is that you want to hurt someone badly, hire a car, making sure that at least two people are eligible to drive it, then simply go and run him down. At worst, you'll suffer a few meaningless points and a small fine.
The police, CPS and judges wil all say 'so sorry, not us', the politicians will ignore the issue for terror of offending the moton lobby, and you'll have got away with it. Brilliant, what a fantastic attempt at protecting innocent people.
Did the police appeal for witnesses? Or nearby drivers from the video footage? You can read numberplates in the cyclist's video - other drivers may be able to say whether a male or female was driving (although it'll be harder given the passage of time).
Other drivers, or passengers, or even onlookers would probably have seen the driver of this car. They should have been contacted by the police, using if necessary requests for witnesses via the media.
Like someone's already said local CCTV could be checked to ID driver, good job for a PCSO! Seat dimensions and position could be measured by an accident investigator to see if the likely driver was the male or female. Cell site analysis of each of the suspects mobile phones to see where they were at what times etc etc. if the Police could be arsed to put a bit of effort in they could ID the driver. Clearly they don't mind having these maniacs on our roads!!! Rant over!
Private prosecution?
Private prosecution?
If the hire company can't determine who was driving, then they should be shut down and not allowed to continue their business. There's plenty of companies who can keep accurate records and I'm sure some of them would welcome extra business.
Except that it is possible when you hire a vehicle for two different people to be insured to use it. Obviously they will both deny being the driver at this time. Unless phone records can prove one was at this location and the other was not.......
So, 54yr old man fined £150 and 6 penalty points. Can't be that hard to find his details in the court records......
Easy tiger - the BBC had him as 52 - so put down the pitchfork..
Right, my first question is why Nottinghamshire Police seemingly investigated and pursued this under traffic laws (which most of know already are not really fit for purpose when it comes to these types of incidents) and not as attempted murder and/or assualt with a deadly weapon. Now, getting an attempted murder charge to stick might have been very difficult but I would think assault with a deadly weapon could have stuck? It looks clear cut to me!
The issue seems to me about the starting point by Nottinghamshire Police. Had they approached this differently from the off and assigned the CID resourse to these more two serious offences, as they would have done if some random person just walked up to you in the street and hit you around the head with a baseball bat, then the whole approach both morally and legally would have been different. As it is, it would seem they started down a route of using traffic laws from the off and then ultimatley it was this that has ended up with them and the CPS being legally backed into corner and all that happens is some guys gets a £150 fine and 6 points.
The victim is totally correct, this is not justice, the two prime suspects have not even appeared in any sort of court! I don't understand why, just because this happened on the highway, this has been treated as a traffic offence.
As another poster as pointed out, is this a seemingly simple way to get away with a murder?
They're not fit for purpose because juries don't convict on them. That's not the fault of the police.
There's no evidence of intent.
You'd never get attempted murder to stick. Careless or dangerous driving, maybe. It's not assault because there's no evidence of intent.
I concede that it does seem lazy of the police not to pursue it any further, but there is no pressure on them to do better except from the victims, and cyclists are an unpopular minority, so what do they care?
I'm sort of puzzled by your comment that there is no evidence of intent. The car followed him for quite a way at a reasonable distance, then suddenly accelerated into him. If there was no intent the driver would have had to forget the existence of a cyclist within maybe 10 seconds.
No intent? You hit someone directly in front of you, who has clary been there for some time, without intent. How about I go stand in s busy place with a baseball bat, and yhd at a random time swing it in s big arc around me with my eyes closed? I'd never get away with claiming accident. In this case the driver must have been able to the victim. Had it been an accident the driver would have stopped.
This doesn't seem to be "just an accident", from the video it looks like attempted murder in broad daylight. Is this the level of investigative vigour that the Police and CPS in Nottingham apply to all cases of unprovoked attack with a lethal weapon?
I had a similar incident where I was struck from behind by (in my case by a HGV). Although I had no camera, another driver made a note of the vehicle details. I was told by the police that it was impossible to trace the driver as the vehicle belonged to a haulage company and so many different drivers used it.
I get the impression sometimes that they just can't be bothered.
I simply do not believe that the haulage company doesn't keep track of who is driving which of their vehicles at any given time. If that is true, they must trust their staff imensely.
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