A reader provided me with this link, which I hadn’t seen – it’s in today’s Daily Mail.
Readers will be aware that I ran a few articles on the Cassie’s Law E-Petition. The petition closed last November, and I honestly thought that it had failed to gain enough support to be debated in Parliament.
The reader who sent the link referred to MY campaign. I wish I could claim that honour, but all I did was report on it and push it as hard as I could. I was not involved with it beyond that, and did not liaise with Jackie McCord (Cassie’s mother) in any way at all. The story just touched me – as well as hitting a nerve! The only thing I do know is that the stories I posted got quite a few hits and I’d like to think that this led to the petition gaining some extra signatures.
Anyway, as the story reveals, Cassie’s Law is to become LAW.*
For those not aware of the story, Cassie McCord was 16 when she was hit by an 87-year old driver who mixed up his accelerator and brakes, flew on to a pavement, and crushed her against a wall. He had already been involved in an accident days earlier and had refused to surrender his licence. Police were powerless to do anything.
You can read the full story for yourselves, but this was great news to see. And we mustn’t forget the others who lost their lives due to elderly drivers who shouldn’t have been on the road.
* the changes are not actually a change in the Law, but procedures have been put in place to get elderly and medically unfit drivers off the road quicker – something that would have saved Cassie’s life if it had been in place sooner.