Yes, the book has been thrown at this bloody idiot, and quite right too:
Victoria's fastest recorded speeding driver has been jailed for at least three months after clocking 255 km/h in his high performance car as he led police on an interstate pursuit.
Twenty-year-old P-plater Justin Pickering was first spotted by police on August 2 last year in his new Subaru Impreza WRX STI sedan in Gundagai in NSW, but slipped away at 200 km/h when officers tried to stop him in nearby Holbrook.
Over the next 350 kilometres, he was clocked at 185km/h outside Albury and, after crossing the border, reached Victorian police's fastest illegal recorded speed of 255 km/h on the Hume Highway at Seymour.
Let's get this in perspective:
The court heard that at 255 km/h, the car would have taken 8.9 seconds, or 367 metres, to stop.
That is it would have taken a third of a kilometre or twice the length of the MCG playing field for this clown to halt his vehicle.
That is utterly indefensible. Although naturally his lawyer tried:
Defence lawyer Stan Waites said Pickering was immature and vulnerable.
He said he was developmentally delayed and his family had suffered much anguish over this.
I do feel for his family, but how much worse would they have felt if their "immature and vulnerable" son had killed someone else's much-loved child, spouse, or parent? Or even wiped-out a whole family? Note that even after being impounded for two days, his car was written-off in a single car accident, presumably by the same irresponsible driver.
His license has been cancelled for five years. Frankly, this is not nearly enough. I don't care what extenuating circumstances might apply, this person should never, ever be allowed to get behind the wheel of a car again. He clearly lacks the basic capacity to accept the awful responsibility of piloting a motorised vehicle.
He's also been jailed for a minimum of three months. How much would he have got if he'd killed someone?
I agree that serious traffic violations need to be treated as equally criminal as any other conduct that endangers human life (although we can probably do without the medieval removal of body parts method of punishment!)
But I am not prepared to condemn all drivers of a particular make of car simply because a few of their number are numbskulls.
Comments
There needs to be some way to demonstrate to people like this that driving is a privilege, not a right. Perhaps amputation of the accellerator foot would get the message accross.
And why am I unsurprised to find its a suburu driver. Suburu, the volvo of the new century.