Commentary
The New Criminals
IN the Lords debate on road accidents Lord Goddard recalled a motorist who : . . . in broad daylight drove bang into a railway crossing gate, and then fought like a madman when he was taken out of his car. The first jury disagreed, the second jury acquitted him. He got straight into his car and went off to Bournemouth and was picked up for being drunk in charge of a car.' -
This, Lord Goddard complained, is what sometimes happens in apparently cast-iron cases; the defendant elects to go for trial at Quarter Sessions, and ' no one has ever yet found a way of preventing a jury from return- ing a perverse verdict'. So, drunken drivers escape punishment, or receive one which is negligible in relation to the offence: and serious crime on the roads increases until it is now the worst class of crime which society has to face.
Juries are perverse for two reasons. The first is that for the law to be respected and properly administered members of juries must not be criminals themselves. Very few jurymen, it can confidently be assumed, are burglars or forgers ; they can consequently be relied upon to deal as firmly with cases of burglary or forgery as firmly as the law de- mands. But a large number of jurymen have driven cars dangerously, or drunkenly—or have friends or relations who are in the habit of doing so. In such cases, the juryman is apt to think of himself in the dock, along with the prisoner : and convictions are accordingly hard to come by.
The second reason is that even those members of juries who are never dangerous or drunken drivers, or who do not drive at all, are confronted with a difficulty when they are asked to find a verdict in a case of drunken or dangerous driving. The .motorist in the dock is not, colloquially speaking, a member of the criminal classes. He may be—and often is—an ordinary looking individual from a reasonable respectable home with a good job and a family to provide for. He did not (or so jurymen tell themselves) intend to drive his car into a level crossing ; and as for fighting with the police, that might have been the result of shock. He should not, therefore, be sent to prison. But he will be, if we find him guilty. So: the jury disagrees or finds a verdict of Not Guilty.
It is not only juries who have these feelings. As Barbara Wootton pointed out later in her contribution to the Lords debate, there are many magistrates dispensing justice around Britain who have been convicted of car crimes (and doubtless there are many more who ought to have been, and would have been if the local police had not recognised whom they were about to pull in, and stopped proceedings in time). John Gordon has recently given one or two unsavoury instances in the Sunday Express of magistrates who though they have been convicted of crimes—theft, in one case—have not been removed from the Bench. It is deplorable that any Court should be presided over by a man who has been con- victed of a serious crime; the government argument that such convictions need not be a bar to anybody becoming a magistrate is calculated to bring the courts into disrepute.
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that magistrates as well as juries treat the motoring offender leniently; as the figures that Lady Wootton gave demonstrate. In 1957, prison sentences were passed in the higher courts on only 19 out of 217 convictions for driving under the influence of drink or drugs and 10 out of 131 for dangerous or reckless driving. In the magistrates' courts the pro- portion is still lower; out of 3,000-odd sentences for driving under the influence, 153 were of imprisonment; and of nearly 5,000 sentences for dangerous driving, 107 were of imprisonment.
And driving offenders are not a small sector of the criminal community. Lady Wootton underlined in the Lords what she has written in her recent book by pointing out that offences of violence against the person, commonly thought to be the most serious type of crime, are only half as widespread as con-
victions for what might be termed motorists'I crimes of violence—manslaughter, driving under the influence, driving dangerously, and failing to stop after, or report, an accident.
What, then, is to be done? One step could be taken immediately, and that would be to impose disqualification automatically for all serious. driving offences. Cases of hardship could be dealt with on appeal; but normally, everybody who has been found guilty of driving to the public danger should drive no more—the length of the disqualification depending on the seriousness of the offence. Disqualification could also be more freely used in cases of careless driving, where the rate is much less than 10% of convictions.
But disqualification, though it would help to make the roads safer, can hardly do more than check the rise in road offences. Some- thing more drastic is required. Lord Elton suggests special courts; there are practical difficulties, as well as objections in principle, but they may prove necessary. What would be more to the point would be a change of penalties. So long as offending motorists are destined, if sentenced, to jails, where they will he alongside the burglar and the forger, so long will the courts continue reluctant to convict. The solution may eventually be found not in special courts but in special penalties, which differentiate the man who commits a motoring crime from the thief. It is, of course, arguable that this is unfair to the thief ; certainly it is true that many a thief is much less anti-social than the predictably drunk driver. But necessity will probably drive th community to make the distinction, whethe it is fair or not, if it is found to be the onl way to deal with the criminals of the road.
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