No jail for "dangerous driving causing death"?

Another pro-crime judgment from an Australian court

Timothy Thornton never had the chance to wear the watch his girlfriend Catherine McLeay bought him for his 25th birthday. It now lies next to him in his coffin. Killed in a road smash on Easter Monday last year, the young solicitor's death has left an emptiness in Ms McLeay's life that was exacerbated by a decision in a Sydney court this week.

The man convicted of causing the fatal crash – fruit and vegetable millionaire Natale "Nick" Pisciuneri – was sentenced only to home detention after a jury found him guilty of dangerous driving causing death. The fact Pisciuneri, 57, has 20 speeding offences on his licence failed to sway Judge John Goldring, who ruled there was "insufficient evidence" to prove he was speeding at the time of the crash. An overwhelming 92 per cent of The Daily Telegraph readers who voted in an online poll yesterday said the sentence was too light.

Yesterday, as she struggled to comprehend the penalty imposed on Pisciuneri, Ms McLeay, 24, spoke of the crash in March last year when "the love of my life was needlessly snatched away". At the time of the crash near Camden, Mr Thornton was on his way to his girlfriend's house for a 25th birthday dinner in his honour. Mr Thornton, a solicitor at the NSW Department of Veterans Affairs, had planned to get engaged to his sweetheart of four years, travel the world with her and start a family. But instead of discussing wedding plans at his birthday celebrations, Ms McLeay was at Liverpool hospital "waiting for him to die". "Funeral planning was surreal," Ms McLeay said in a victim impact statement tendered to the court at Pisciuneri's sentencing hearing. "I had imagined walking down the aisle for our wedding, not following Tim's coffin. There was a crushing pain in my chest. I figured that must be how it feels to actually have a broken heart."

Ms McLeay described both Pisciuneri's sentence and his two-week trial as "a joke." On Monday, the court was told Pisciuneri had not expressed his regret to Mr Thornton's family in fear any apology would be seen as an admission of guilt.

Report here



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