Cyclists to protest against lax treatment of Killer Motorists

Cycling website, Road.cc ,adds the cyclists' statement:

"Across Europe, motorists are presumed to be at fault in motorist-cyclist collisions. In the UK, even faced with prime evidence of a dead body, a driver does not have to prove his innocence. Instead, the CPS decides whether charges can successfully be brought against the motorist, and can then choose to drop a case entirely.

In Anthony’s case (and as is claimed in Eilidh’s case, and in the cases of many others) the van driver’s defence that he simply didn't see the cyclists was accepted by the CPS as an adequate accounting for the death of a highly principled and well-loved citizen in the prime of his life.

In a time when the nation as a whole is encouraged to exercise, and use forms of transport other than the car, and when climate change is seen as a real threat, cyclists need to feel that they have the full and equal protection of the law when on public roads, and not a law apparently interpreted (or simply set aside) to the maximum advantage of the driver, no matter how culpably careless.

The CPS was in dereliction of its duty last year. We fervently hope that it will adopt a different perspective, starting with the forthcoming case of Eilidh. Allowing drivers to kill with complete impunity just will not do, and does not meet the nation’s needs and priorities.

We append a quotation from Christopher G Thompson, District Crown Prosecutor (Oxford Rural) in a letter sent by him to one of the Reading Cycling Club committee who had written deploring this failure to prosecute (dated 16 March 2009):

“The fact that no prosecution has followed in this case does not in any way mean or suggest that drivers may drive carelessly around cyclists or that cyclists will not be afforded the protection of the law where appropriate.”

In what must have been a considered letter, the phrase affording cyclists the protection of the law “where appropriate” is chilling: NO! We demand the protection of the law."