Sometimes, you couldn’t make it up. Eleanor Brown, 28, served 10 months of a 20-month jail term for killing a man due to dangerous driving. She was jailed in January this year after hitting and killing a moped rider. She hasn’t even had a Christmas away from decent society.
The man, Lee Roberts, left a wife and two young children – the youngest of which cannot remember her father. So there’s a bunch of people who HAVE had their Christmas screwed up.
Incredibly she’s been given her old job back – teaching Latin and Classics at St John’s School, Marlborough.
According to an older story, Brown had moved into the path of oncoming traffic to overtake a van and collided head on with Mr Roberts. She showed “little emotion” when she was jailed (something the school board seems to have overlooked). She already had a fixed penalty for overtaking on a left-hand bend and crossing double white lines – an almost suicidal manoeuvre at the best of times, and something else the school board has neglected to consider with due weight – yet the judge refused to allow the jury to know of it in considering the Roberts case. But that didn’t stop her defence claiming that it was “a momentary lapse”.
Of course it was. Just like the one the jury couldn’t be – but should have been – told about.
The judge said she didn’t even need to overtake in this particular instance. She just did – hardly the action of a good role model for children. He also said that he “must pass” a sentence of 20 months – which appears to be complete bollocks according to the Crown Prosecution Service, since the starting point for causing death by dangerous driving is 3 years minimum, with a maximum of 14 years. The previous case of Brown overtaking dangerously would have to be relevant, as well. Our law is a total ass, administered by complete asses sometimes, and I’m pretty sure that her sex was a valuable mitigating circumstance here (along with her “previous good character” and the “contribution she had made to her community through teaching”, and that she was full of remorse), when the bottom line is simply that she killed a man by driving like an idiot, and had been caught doing almost the same thing previously.
But on the subject of her getting her job back, how can a bunch of school kids ever respect someone they know is responsible for killing someone else? It’s bound to keep coming up in the playground (or whatever they have at these posh schools).