@HelloToMyKitty. I agree with everything you say.
Ultimately this case comes down to the following:
Mistaking the brake for the accelerator is legally within the definition of dangerous driving. (As is mistakenly driving on the wrong side of the road). Even though it is a mistake and not a deliberate act. This man did not “choose” to drive dangerously, unlike someone who chooses to speed, or drive after a drink, or texts at the wheel (?how many of you have done that?).
If your dangerous driving (even if it is a MISTAKE rather than a deliberate act - and I would distinguish the two) happens not to kill anyone, then you get almost no punishment.
If your dangerous driving happens to kill someone then the starting point for sentencing is a mandatory prison term.
Who does that help???
It would be much better to fine drivers to the tune of thousands of pounds for using their mobile phones at the wheel to reduce the rates of (deliberate) dangerous driving and not leave them unpunished just because there is no KSI (killing or serious injury) which at the moment is the only time the police check phone records after accidents. This would actually save lives unlike jailing a man who would undoubtedly never drive again and had killed a woman by accident.
The problem is mandatory sentencing. Ken Clarke was going to repeal those laws but ceased to be a minister before he could.
Mandatory sentencing is what went wrong with the Sally Challen case too, in which I was heavily involved...... she was convicted of murder (8 years later reduced to manslaughter on appeal). She was then sentenced to life imprisonment - so far, so normal - but with a mandatory MINIMUM term of 22 years (reduced to 18 years on sentencing appeal) because of the use of a weapon brought to the scene. She was going to serve more time than almost any male murderer who kills his partner with his bare hands, with no mitigating circumstances whatsoever, because she was caught by mandatory sentencing laws aimed at gangs carrying knives. Had the Judge had discretion on sentencing, hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money would have been saved and a suitable sentence served in the first place.
I can give many other examples of cruel (and expensive to the taxpayer) outcomes of mandatory sentencing. Leave judges with discretion.
Picking up on the point of an earlier poster - no, this man did not have a dignified death. Far from it.
Where is everyone’s logic and humanity? Condemning him to a cruel and dreadful end, having by all accounts been a perfectly decent human being all his life, didn’t do a single thing to ameliorate the suffering of those he (accidentally) ran over, and their families.