A licence to kill

Press, 26 July 1989, Page 12

A licence to kill

Some days losing your temper and grasping your opponent round the throat to shake him or her up just isn’t enough. On days like this, only immediate demise will satisfy you. Iri days of old this, demise was a little hard to engineer. You either

did it yourself and ran the risk of spending the. remainder of your formative years incarcerated, or paid someone else to do it... an expensive business fraught with pitfalls. Today, however, we have an all-new, improved system if we r want to knock someone ’ off without penalty. One merely monitors the chosen victim’s movements, chooses a time when he or she is motoring gently down the road, and then executes a

motoring turn which will kill them.

Voila! That done, you can now sit back and relax in the comfort of your own home. Your normal day to day routine will be interrupted only twice. Once when you appear in court to answer the charge, the next time when you appear for sentencing. Simple, isn’t it? The beauty about this whole thing is that it is perfectly legal. ’ We know this because the court pages in our newspapers tell us so every time they print a report of a laughably light sentence. Don’t you just feel sick that you never thought of this before? If you are really lucky and can plead poverty (and who cannot in these hard times) you won’t even have to fork out for your legal expenses. Of course, there are drawbacks. Sometimes people who have not been chosen as victims get killed on the road by someone totally unrelated, or without a vested interest in them.

This is called an accident, It is called an accident even when the person doing the killing is drunk. It is called an accident

when an unlicensed and inexperienced driver decides to go for a spin. Why people persist in calling incidents of this kind accidents when the dictionary defines an accident as something which occurs by chance, and both the aforementioned activities are pre-medi-tated, is beyond me. Perhaps I’m being pedantic. Perhaps if someone fell against me as I extended a knife toward a vulnerable part of their body and killed them it. could also be termed accidental. Even if I was running at them at full speed at the time. Given that road incidents which result in death are part and parcel of our daily lives, perhaps we should look at the consistency with which justice operates in this area. Several months ago a judge sentenced a teenage boy who was riding a motorbike without a licence. The boy was not committing any offence apart from being unlicensed. Nor had he caused an accident.

He was fined $lOOO, and will not be able to sit for his licence for two years. More recently, a young woman was sentenced for causing death while driving a car when unlicensed. She will serve 100 hours of community ser-

vice, and be unable to gain her licence for a year. On reading the sentences one would be forgiven for presuming that the boy had created the greater offence. The old story of justice not only being done, but being seen to be done can never be more true than in cases where a life has been taken or irrevocably changed for the worse. \ It is more than a little insulting to the family and friends of the deceased to see that loss of life taken so lightly, with sentences which border on the facetious. Which is why we have groups such as M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Groups like these are continually educating society against the dangers of drunk driving and campaigning for stiffer penalties. They do this because our justice system seems to be failing us somewhat in this respect.

The sheer frustration of police and Ministry of Transport officers who spend hours preparing for these court cases, only to see the offender lightly sentenced, can only be imagined. The frustration, bitterness, and grief of the victim’s family and friends, on the other hand, doesn’t even bear thinking about.