ROAD MORTALITY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 98, 27 April 1932, Page 7

ROAD MORTALITY.

DEATH-DEALING CARS.

Bill in House of Lords Provides Manslaughter Charge.

SECOND READING AGREED TO

(United P.A.—Electric Telegraph—Copyright)

(Received 11 a.m.)

LONDON, April 20.

Lord Buckmaster, in the House of Lords, moved the second reading of a bill to provide that any motor drivers killing anyone may be guilty of manslaughter and that punishment could be varied in accordance with the degree of negligence. If any human injury was caused through negligence a driver should be guilty of wilful wounding.

The bill provides a minimum penalty of six months' imprisonment for failure to stop after causing an injury, and fixes five miles an hour as the speed limit of goods vehicles weighing over five tons.

Lord Buckmaster said he had driven a car all over Britain for 20 3'eara without once endangering a living thing, yet now the roads were being turned into racing tracks. In a recent case a motorist who killed three people was only fined £15.

The Lord Chancellor, Viscount Sankey, said there was no need to amend the law but to enforce it, and suggested that the speed limit would reduce the whole traffic of Loudon to five miles an hour.

Viscount Cecil said that children and elderly people were being slaughtered in large numbers every year by motorists who were escaping punishment.

Lord Howe said that though he was a racing motorist he sympathised with Lord Buckmaster. Magistrates in Britain ought to have power of perpetual arrestment of certain cars as they possessed on the Continent.

The bill was read a second time with out a division.