ISSUE 5 2008 - Sweet & Maxwell

Crim. L.R. Causing Death by Driving and Other Offences 349
the road. V, who was crossing the road, made a remark which D misheard and
considered insulting. He got out of his car, pulled V aside and struck him ‘‘with
tremendous force’’, smashing V’s left maxilla and zygomatic bones with a single
punch. V fractured his skull as he fell to the ground. D made no effort to assist
him. He got back into his car and drove off, as V lay dying in the road. The
whole incident was recorded on CCTV, which disproved D’s original version of
the incident, according to which he had acted in self defence when V threatened
him with a bottle. As in Sykes, D faced a charge of murder, but his plea of guilty to
manslaughter was accepted and a sentence of five years’ imprisonment was initially
imposed. On appeal, Lord Woolf C.J. described D’s offence as ‘‘a bad case of its
type’’ and as ‘‘a gratuitous and unprovoked attack, in which D violently attacked a
wholly innocent victim’’. Despite this, D’s sentence was halved.
An even more serious case was Sutton 49 in which D and his friends kidnapped V,
‘‘a decent inoffensive man’’ who was drunk at the time, tied him up, put him in the
boot of their car and threw him off a bridge into a river in the early hours of a cold
March morning. They drove off, without making any effort to ascertain whether
V was alive or dead. He died. As in Sykes and Roberts, a plea of manslaughter
was accepted on a charge of murder, and for this offence a sentence of five years’
imprisonment was upheld on appeal. 50
One more example must suffice. In Parnham 51 Dbeathiswifetodeathin
a ferocious attack with an iron bar, hitting her over 70 times and raining 44
blows on her head alone. He lied repeatedly to the police and when his attempt
to manufacture evidence of a break-in was disproved he falsely claimed to have
been acting in self defence. Charged with murder, but somehow convicted only of
constructive manslaughter (to which he had offered a plea of guilty), his original
sentence of six years was quashed as ‘‘manifestly excessive’’. A sentence of four
years was substituted. 52
A striking feature common to all four cases, each of which involved an initial
charge of murder, is that the sentences imposed did not even come close to the
kind of sentence that is routinely imposed in bad cases of CDDD.
To find CDDD cases attracting comparable penalties, one need only look to
cases of ‘‘intermediate’’ or ‘‘higher’’ culpability. In Poel, 53 D attempted to retune a
new radio in the cab of his HGV and reacted too slowly to the fact that traffic in
front of him on the motorway was stopping. He braked too late and although the
resulting impact would not ordinarily have been fatal, the driver of the van in front
was not wearing a seat belt and was killed when thrown forwards by the impact. D’s
original three-year sentence on a guilty plea was reduced to two years on appeal,
but this reflected a number of mitigating factors, including an impeccable 27-year
driving record, his own serious injuries and his honourable behaviour and remorse
after the accident.
49 [2006] EWCA Crim 421.
50 A further sentence was imposed for the kidnapping. Lesser penalties were imposed on
D’s associates. See, e.g. Mann [2006] EWCA Crim 2297 (four years).
51 [2003] EWCA Crim 416.
52 A six-year sentence was however upheld in Kime [1999] 2 Cr. App. R. (S.) 3, in which
D struck and killed an elderly man whom he thought had been laughing at him as he argued
with his girlfriend.
53 This was one of several appeals conjoined with Richardson [2006] EWCA Crim 3186;
[2007] 2 All E.R. 601.
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