Manslaughter

Posted on July 15th, 2008 by ray.
Categories: General Blog.

I’ve been having some chats recently about the laws when it comes to causing death whilst on the roads, and some of my recent posts are where people have been killed and their “killer” only got a fine. The maximum penalty for “driving with undue care” in England is a £5000 fine (means tested) and no custodial sentence.

Death by dangerous driving is more serious and carries up to a ten year sentence,  but what most people consider as dangerous are very different to what the courts decide is just undue care. Personally I consider most actions which stop you looking where you’re going, be it arguing with the kids in the back seat, dicking around on your sat-nav, looking for a CD in the glove compartment, trying to find your lighter in your handbag etc. as dangerous as it’s a very logical sequence of events and certainly not ‘accidental’, however the law says otherwise.

This has sparked the debate of what benefit there is to putting people like this in prison, as they never intentionally meant to kill someone and it was literally a moment of undue care that tragically resulted in a death. Would locking them up with other criminals actually serve any purpose other than a sense of justice or revenge for the significant other’s of the victim.

I’ve looked at this more as it is an interesting topic for how we as a society deal with situations like this. People’s opinions vary greatly from public floggings and capital punishment right down to the do away with jails as the perpetrator is the real victim and needs rehabilitation and forgiveness.

I’ve also had mixed emotions when imagining a family member being on both sides of a situation like this:

1) A family member is knocked down and killed by a car driver having a lapse of concentration
2) A family member having a lapse of concentration and killing someone else.

Then I took a step back and asked myself a more simple question:

“There is already a crime of unintentionally killing someone, and that is manslaughter, so why are we singling out motorists and making them exempt?”

The cynic in me would say it is because the standard of driving is now so low and that deaths are that common then it is becoming the norm, and we don’t want to be locking too many people up.

I don’t expect a perfect law, but I do expect a consistent law. If we’re basically letting people off for one type of manslaughter then we should be doing the same for even more ‘accidental’ or indirect deaths.

Perhaps we should modernise our manslaughter laws and include in this vehicular manslaughter, and then decide how strict or lenient we want to be on the whole manslaughter law in general?

Hmmm.

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