Czech courier who killed a senior while reversing gets suspended term

The regional appeal court in Brno has rejected the appeal of a driver who reversed down a one-way street in Blansko and killed an elderly woman. The court said outright that a driver guilty of such “laziness and recklessness” belongs in prison, but it could not make the sentence harsher. This is according to a ruling from the summer that journalists were able to read.

Twenty seconds in reverse

The accident happened in early April last year in the centre of Blansko. The driver of a delivery van decided to reverse down a one-way street to deliver another parcel. He reversed for at least 20 seconds, and could see the woman in his mirror for about 15 seconds. According to camera footage available to the court, the elderly woman, who had trouble walking, had no idea a car was approaching her from that direction.

The district court in Blansko sentenced the man for negligent homicide to one year in prison, suspended for a probationary period of a year and a half, and banned him from driving for 14 months. The court took into account that the driver admitted guilt and paid the victims 250,000 crowns on top of insurance.

The appeal ended in a rebuke

Even this lenient punishment did not satisfy the driver, and he appealed. He claimed the driving ban was ruinous for him and proposed that the criminal prosecution be conditionally halted, with him paying a further sum into a fund for crime victims.

The appeal panel, headed by judge Josef Teplý, would not hear of it. The judges called the proposal to halt the case unacceptable and the sentence itself entirely disproportionately lenient: the driver faced up to six years, and in the panel’s view there was no reason to suspend such an already mild sentence.

“The victim could not possibly have expected that anyone would reverse a motor vehicle down a one-way street. The defendant put his personal interest in shortening his route and saving time above compliance with the general duties of a road user,” Judge Teplý wrote in the ruling.

The driving ban was also called short. But the appeal court cannot correct this error of the district court: the prosecutor did not appeal, so the sentence could not be made harsher. Judge Teplý called the prosecution’s failure to appeal “somewhat incomprehensible”.

To the driver’s argument that he needs his licence for work, the judge replied that he should have thought about the consequences of his irresponsible and careless behaviour before the accident, not now.

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Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz