Judge ups sentence of negligent driver involved in fatal accident
Reuters file photo
SINGAPORE — Although the pedestrian he ran over was jaywalking, a 62-year-old man cannot be said to be less culpable, ruled a judge as he upped the sentence from a fine to a two-week jail term.
Ruling in favour of the prosecution, who had launched an appeal against the maximum fine of S$10,000 imposed on David Joseph John, Judge of Appeal Tay Yong Kwang said the driver did not have a valid reason for “forgetting (to keep a lookout on) the rest of the road”.
The victim, Wong Fook Hin, 79, died in hospital 10 days after the accident along Outram Road in 2015. He suffered severe traumatic head injuries and fractures to his ribs and leg, among other injuries.
Arguing against the “manifestly inadequate” punishment meted out to John on Monday (Aug 28), Deputy Public Prosecutor Christina Koh said the judge in the lower court had “erroneously placed significant weight on the fact that the deceased was jaywalking”.
The prosecutor also pointed to a landmark case in 2014 where a three-judge High Court bench led by Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon had ruled that fines will no longer apply in fatal road traffic cases involving negligent drivers. Instead, judges should consider a jail term of up to four weeks as the starting point for such cases.
In that case, the driver got behind the wheel even though she had gone 24 hours without sleep. She got into an accident and killed one and injured 11.
In the present case, John, a market stallholder, was “momentarily distracted” by traffic on a side road while driving down Outram Road in the evening of Nov 13, 2015.
Although Wong was jaywalking, John would have had “ample time” to notice and avoid the pedestrian, had he been paying attention to the road ahead, said DPP Koh.
Wong was dressed in light-coloured clothing and was not dashing across the road, she added. And because the accident happened at about 7.14pm, it would “still have been fairly bright”.
Jaywalking across roads in built-up areas is also “reasonably foreseeable”, the prosecutor said, pointing to how the High Court had in the past held that drivers need to be alert at all times to pedestrians crossing the road indiscriminately.
While victims’ acts of jaywalking may reduce the offender’s culpability in some cases, this was not one of them, she stressed.
“A reasonable and prudent driver would not be expected to focus on only one point when driving, but to scan the road and its immediate surroundings,” said DPP Koh.
John displayed a high degree of negligence as he would have “easily spotted the deceased walking across the road if he had kept a proper lookout”, she added.
The fact that John had knocked down a young cyclist just three weeks before this fatal accident, while driving the same van, also points to his significant culpability, DPP Koh said — an argument Justice Tay agreed with.
John pleaded guilty in March to one charge of negligently causing the death of Wong. In relation to the accident involving a nine-year-old cyclist while driving along Jalan Bukit Merah, a charge he faced for causing grievous hurt was taken into consideration for the purposes of sentencing.
Besides his sentence being enhanced to a jail term, John’s five-year disqualification from driving was upheld by the court.
