This story makes you wonder how this guy will behave if – God forbid – he were ever to gain a driving licence.
At 37, Alexssandro Osti is far from being young – at least physically – but he sure could be considered extremely immature. The idiot was spotted not wearing a seatbelt, and when police tried to stop him he raced off at speeds of around 60mph. He drove on the wrong side of roads, narrowly missed colliding with another vehicle, appears to have cornered on only two wheels, and then crashed into a wall. He was unaccompanied and had no licence.
In a continuation of the comedy act which passes for The Law in England, Osti was given 200 hours of unpaid community service, some sort of course, banned for 2 years, and ordered to take an extended test. He should have been imprisoned and banned for life – and deported. Mitigation said he was “a man of previous good character” – so good, in fact, that he had obviously been driving around for an unspecified period of time without a licence, probably without a seatbelt, and also probably no supervising driver. Yes, a man of excellent character.
Compare that with this Scottish case, where Pauline Medhurst, an ex-driving instructor, was found slumped behind the wheel of her car and discovered to be four times the legal drink-drive limit. She tried the usual trick – post-natal depression – and although it prevented a custodial sentence (Scotland is still too close to England to be entirely free of stupidity in its laws), she was slapped with a two-year community payback order, 300 hours of community service, and banned for 40 months.
By my reckoning, her sentence was approximately twice as stiff as Osti’s.