You are reading a single comment by @adroit and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@adroit
Some of things she said in her statement.
She left home and went to a petrol station to buy coffee. She was planning to drink her coffee on a journey of 40 minutes. The station is close to her house, she didn't buy petrol, or didn't say she bought petrol.
She allegedly set the sat nav at the petrol station, but it seems that she was setting it on the road after leaving the station.
She was going to her parents house, a journey she did regularly. Hardly the sort of journey that would need a navigation system.
She noticed that the time of journey was longer than anticipated, which she assumed was due to some traffic incident. That in itself took some time to assimilate
Part of her defence was that her children had set the sat nav to zoomed right in whilst in the car earlier (they were not in the car on the journey in question) The kids must have also had the keys, and they were in the car and the ignition was switched on. I don't think anyone believed that for an instant, and it undermined a lot of her other defences. She said she was just zooming out, but had only zoomed out from 50 metre scale to 200 metre scale which took two button clicks and about 3 seconds. So to account for the time she was driving and not seeing Anthony Milsom she would have had to be fairly intently scrutinising and programming her sat nav just to get to her parents.
Today I sat behind Anthony Hilsom's mother, wife and one of his daughters. The other daughter was too traumatised to attend.
To see them frequently break down with emotion at the content of the judges summing up almost reduced me to tears myself.
I am surprised at the verdict because the threshold for Death by Dangerous Driving is very high, and the fact that she was doing well below the speed limit I thought would lead the jury to believe she was careless rather than dangerous.