Ceaseless Change

6 months to a year in jail isnt unusual, although a first offence you might well get off with a fine, a driving ban, and some community service or something, assuming you weren't caught driving dangerously.

The reason your line or argument here irritates me so much, to be honest, is this: If someone kills your loved one and they have a license, the fact that they have a license will not be any reassurance. However if someone kills your loved one and they don't have a license, and aren't insured, that makes it even worse. Maybe you aren't aware that it does, but it does. So even raising this just seems.... unkind. As well as logically trivial - I mean, having a license doesn't magically prevent accidents? We all knew that. It didn't need repeating over and over anyway, let alone that you just seem to be oblivious to the difference the perpetrator driving legally or not makes to the families, as well as in what you are charged with and the sentence you get. It's fundamentally important, but you seem to just not get that. I can practically picture you saying to her mother - "Look, even if he had had insurance and a license, she'd still be dead". And that makes me cringe. (Because for all you know, she's reading this.)

Not to mention being uninsured, and driving with minors in the car who were not wearing seat belts.

Well, you've done a very thorough job of establishing that licenses aren't magic, and don't magically prevent accidents, whilst admitting that they do help. *slow clap*

COULD have been, but not as LIKELY to have been. You seem confused about why exactly we even have licenses.... There is a link, you know, between being licensed to drive, and not driving like an idiot..... That's kind of the entire bloody point.

Why are you again saying the above? I AM NOT SAYING, 'if you ignore all the factors that explain why he came to be driving a too full car too fast on the wrong road in the wrong way, then it just boils down to physics.' because this is what YOU ARE SAYING - not me. I was talking to WTF, not you It's him that is saying that the fact that he didn't have the paperwork is "irrelevant".

Manxy, he had obvious criminal intent to drive illegally. I am not claiming he intended to kill anyone, equally obviously he did not. But that is less important. When you take one action, with criminal intent, and other things result from that even if you didn't intend those consequences, you are still held criminally responsible in almost all cases. It's called the eggshell principle. If you punch someone in a criminal act of assault, and that person unbeknown to you has a neurological condition which means even a light blow could be deadly, and they do in fact die, you will be charged with manslaughter at minimum, and not merely assault. You didn't intend to kill them, but you did kill them. So, tough. Jail time.

So you're saying, if you ignore all the factors that explain why he came to be driving a too full car too fast on the wrong road in the wrong way, then it just boils down to physics. Sherlock you are not.

And finally, just to ram home how daft this is - please quote someone, anyone, who actually said this. That just by being licensed and insured this would not have happened. Can't? Exactly.

Put it another way, you are basically saying that his sentence should not be any different, if he had actually been legal to drive and insured. Because if the paperwork is irrelevant, why should it impact sentencing? But I assume you can see how dumb that is.

It's not a fair point, not at all. It's fundamentally relevant. The lack of paperwork indicates criminal intent. It is what turns this from tragic teenage hijinks in to criminally reckless stupidity. How can you not see that?

You've wasted all this breath just to make the point that sometimes people driving without a license don't crash, and sometimes people driving with a license do. and that it COULD (but didn't) have turned out that nobody died, in an alternate universe or whatever? Why exactly? Please tell me there was a point in there that was actually helpful in any way.

well i'm quite confident he didn't intend to deliberately crash, and didn't intend to kill anyone so its an accident. i agree he shouldn't have been there, and if he wasn't then he wouldn't have crashed the car. but even the proper driver with a car overloaded and chasing motorway speed limits has a fair chance of fucking up along the switchback. my point is that the paperwork i.e.insurance and licence had zero physical effect on the crash. if he hadn't crashed we'd never have heard about it and wouldn't be having this conversation. if he actually had a licence and insurance the crash was still a good ( not good as in good but real odds of ) possibillty. as a point. joey dunlop didn't hold a licence to drive a motorbike on the public highway, would you have said before he was killed he couldn't ride a motorbike???? i realise he eventually crashed and killed himself after many years of racing on the edge, but no licence doesn't mean you can't ride. Of course being licensed to drive and being a good driver arent the same thing. But it's not like there is no correlation between the two - if there wasn't, it wouldn't be a legal requirement, obviously. But my point wasn't about that - my point was that he deliberately broke the law. Your example of Joey Dunlop doesn't work here, because he was never breaking the law - he was legal to race even if he wasn't legal to ride on a public highway. To say someone deliberately broke the law, and what happened next was only an accident is to me a gross misrepresentation of what went on. He was criminally reckless. That is not an accident. An accident is reversing in to a bollard.

Driving without a license or insurance shows contempt for the law, and for yourself, your passengers, and potential bystanders caught up in your criminal recklessness. This was not an accident. It is only an accident in the strictly technical sense that he only intended to break the law without hurting anyone, rather than killing someone. It was an accident only in the sense that it wasn't murder. Nevertheless he intended, and did, break the law in a very serious way. As a result of his lawbreaking, which was there to prevent unlicensed drivers from driving because, by definition, they have not demonstrated competence, someone died. To call that an accident is a mangling of the word beyond all recognition.

I confess myself unable to understand the desire to exact violent revenge, all the comments about "if it was my daughter it wouldnt be safe to leave me alone with him" etc. A death like this causes such awful trauma to so many people. And yet some people's reaction is to admit that their response would be to..... go out and cause yet another death, with yet more awful trauma to so many people. A colloquial definition of insanity is repeating an action and expecting different results........

I wanted to make an observation, and ask a question. Observation - a majority of people, certainly on these forums, seem to take it as obviously true that harsh sentencing acts as a deterrent. But as far as I'm aware, it rarely does. Perhaps never does. I'm genuinely not aware of any evidence that deterrence via sentencing actually works. Does anyone have a link to any good evidence? It seems to me that many people are unshakeably convinced it works, regardless of whether it does or not. Question - is there something about manx culture that means that harsh retributive punishment is so popular? "Life for a life" is a comment i've seen many many times now, both here and on comments on news items on e.g. facebook. It seems a much more common view here than it did when I was living across - although that may be a misperception.

Death by dangerous driving was brought in as a result of driving deaths not getting manslaughter convictions. The reason is because manslaughter requires the activity itself to be unlawful, even if no-one is killed. Whereas driving is not in and of itself unlawful - and juries were acquitting on that technicality, even if the case was otherwise overwhelming. Manslaughter in theory can get a life sentence but normally its far less, <10 years. Death by dangerous driving is up to 14, and the most serious category is 7 - 14. If this case isn't in the most serious category I don't know what is. Some of the comments have expressed the view that if it were your family member killed, you'd want him strung up, or left to rot, or both. Speak for yourself I guess. Not every victim feels that way believe it or not. And that doesn't make them "lily-livered" - that sort of comment says more about you then anything else. If you think about it, revenge is the easy option - so who is being lily-livered when you get down to it? Regarding the alleged "evading police" issue, there are reporting restrictions in place so I think that is why the media haven't followed up on it yet - because they can't, not to avoid "police embarrassment". At least I think/hope that's the reason.