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The recent sentencing of Amal Salad in the Hamilton District Court for careless driving causing death raises questions that go well beyond the courtroom.
Disqualified from driving for 12 months, ordered to pay $4500 emotional harm reparation and $143 in court costs. Honestly – what does that achieve 12 months after the event: an event that really was a tragedy that resulted from a convergence of poor decisions.
I’m thinking symbolism over justice, leaving nobody satisfied. Disqualification as the centrepiece of accountability, imposed long after the event on someone described as “in all other respects a law-abiding citizen” – I repeat: what exactly does this achieve?
Deterrence maybe? The driver has already been through the most traumatic experience of her life. Rehabilitation? She wasn’t a reckless habitual offender. Punishment? Perhaps. But it sure looks and feels more like bureaucratic closure than genuine accountability.
Add that the narrative of exclusive blame directed at the driver doesn’t actually hold up too well to honest scrutiny.
Yes, Salad failed to give way. She had a green light, but she was required to give way before turning right. She failed to do that and misjudged it. That is established.
But the victim, Ngakau Hailey, 18, was riding a dirt bike through a light-controlled city intersection while performing a wheelstand, travelling at a speed estimated at between 53 and 57 kilometres per hour. Both the speed and the stunt are independently illegal. Together, they were a danger to everyone at that intersection. A driver turning right is entitled to the reasonable expectation that oncoming traffic will be travelling at something close to the legal speed. The speed estimate itself carries uncertainty and crash reconstructions have a range of error. Add in that rising to a wheelstand adds to the power to weight ratio of a dirt bike and the acceleration can rise from zero to deceptively fast in tenths of a second.
What we can say is that a rider travelling faster would have cleared the intersection before the car arrived, while a rider travelling slower would have had more time to react and arguably wouldn’t have been there anyway when the driver went. It was the combination of speed, position and diminished control in a wheelstand that placed Hailey at precisely the wrong point at precisely the wrong moment. That is not a defence of careless driving: it’s simply an honest observation about how accidents actually happen.
Let’s be clear: in the circumstances, this wasn’t a blameless young man mown down by a negligent driver. It was a fatal convergence of failures.
The family’s grief is real and profound. A grandmother’s tears and a mother’s declaration that she will never forgive. The true human cost. Nothing in the sentencing, the courtroom or that I am saying here diminishes either.
But grief doesn’t equal culpability. When the defence lawyer made the logical point that Hailey’s manner of riding contributed to the outcome, the gallery erupted. The argument was uncomfortable, but it clearly wasn’t wrong.
A young man is dead. And that is a tragedy without qualification. But what does the court outcome actually represent and how does it deliver anything useful to anybody?
