Pale Rider
Legendary Member
There is no general reluctance to charge, a charge follows a fatal accident more often than not.
Road traffic collision investigations are far from tepid.
Quite a lot goes into accident reconstruction - often closing the road to do it - vehicle examination and general inquiries surrounding those involved.
For example, a cyclist who was an occasional customer of my local bike shop was killed in a collision.
Several months earlier, the cyclist and the shop manager had exchanged a couple of emails about the purchase of lights.
After the cyclist was killed, a detective turned up at the shop to 'talk through' the emails.
That indicates a thorough investigation to me, not a tepid one.
A criminal prosecution is adversarial, it is a battle, there is a winner and a loser.
The loser will often hit out in frustration, which is where I put criticism of the jury system.
None of the alternatives routinely put forward appeal to me.
Sentencing is another area in which one party is very unlikely to be satisfied.
Often both sides are hacked off, the defendant because he's got a stretch, the victim's family because the stretch is not long enough.
I've seen some long sentences handed out for death by dangerous, and some short ones.
None caused me to lose any sleep - each decision could be understood if you had sat through the full proceedings.
