Please note that all my “Darwin Awards” posts are my own take on situations and have no connection with any real award. I just like the term, as it describes people who are idiots very appropriately.
Sometimes, your faith in British justice gets a shot in the arm. This story is a good example of just such a shot.
It helps if you understand just how fast 192mph really is, because then you start to realise just what sort of value Shaun Davis (and his 23-year old daughter, Jordan) put on anyone’s lives except their own.
At such a speed, Davis would have been travelling more than 3 miles every minute. To put that into figures that the average reader might comprehend, he would be travelling more than 85 metres every second – or about 20 car lengths. If he’d have had to stop, even under ideal conditions it would have taken him about 620 metres (around 140 car lengths).
If you’re still not clear on what this means, 620 metres is more than the length of five football pitches.
However, the distances involved are academic, since initiating an emergency stop at that speed would most likely have resulted in a catastrophic accident. It is simply too far outside the range of human reaction times, and the capabilities of vehicle parts (i.e. tyres on roads). Recording it on a handheld device would make it a hundred times worse.
Shaun Davis appears to be one of those people you’d have reservations about if he moved in next door. It appears that every inch of his body below the neck line is tattooed, and he has a penchant for fast cars. It was that penchant for speed that proved his undoing. You see, Davis – who was the kind of person to get arrested on an unrelated matter – had videoed himself driving at very high speed in several fast cars using his smartphone. Whatever the other reason was for his arrest, it was deemed serious enough for police to examine his phone, and it was then that the videos came to light.
In the video footage, Jordan Davis (his daughter) can be heard egging him on, and for that she earns herself a nomination for the Chav Category of the 2015 Darwin Awards.
Davis, who apparently showed no remorse and who denied all charges, was jailed for 28 months, banned from driving for 10 years, and ordered to take an extended re-test. His daughter, who he had obviously brought up to be just as soulless, and for whom the fact that she was even accused of anything let alone found guilty must have come as a major surprise, was banned for 2 years and given an 18-month conditional discharge.
I’m sure that the Davises will find this assessment harsh, because it’s a sad indictment on our society that a great many people who break Laws often aren’t even aware that those Laws exist. Even more worrying, though, is that they often don’t care. So we can only hope that this is seen as a wake-up call and not something to be proud of.