Stricter liability for drivers

I asked Roger about contacting the CPS regarding the SMIDSY/DWDCAA link. Here is his response:

'The one central opportunity to press this message would be to get it included in CPS’s guidance on prosecuting bad driving. However, last time this guidance was revised (c4 years ago), we had a massive crack at influencing it and got absolutely nowhere. We even tried unsuccessfully to mount a judicial review of its failure to reflect the law correctly in terms of how it explains the difference between “careless” and “dangerous” driving (for instance, pulling out of a side-road into the path of a cyclist still counts as an example of “careless” driving!). Yet our legal challenge was turned down on the basis that the CPS’s prosecution guidance doesn’t purport to be a statement of the law, so strictly speaking it couldn’t be held to be a [I]mis[/I]-statement of the law! Consequently, CPS prosecutors are still prosecuting bad driving offences on the basis of guidance which I would still maintain is legally incorrect.

We clearly need to do a hell of a lot of work public, political and media awareness of the problem of the injustices cyclists (and indeed pedestrians) face on the roads, and hence to build up the pressure for change in the way this country does traffic policing, prosecution and sentencing, and ultimately the law itself (including stricter liability). This is what our Stop Smidsy campaign (www.stop-smidsy.org.uk) is designed to do. And even if (when!) we succeed in getting the CPS guidance rewritten next time around, it will doubtless still take a lot of local follow-up campaigning activity to get this and other similar points picked up in the way CPS officers handle individual cases.'