Man who ran over wife gets jail time

Judge had concerns with Percy’s Clarke seeming to minimize his crimes

Provincial court Judge Harold Porter had two issues with Percy Clarke’s pre-sentencing report this week, beginning with his categorization of his crimes.

Clarke was drinking and driving last May when he struck a parked truck, then ran down his wife — who had been standing in the road trying to flag him down — before leaving the scene.

“(In the report) he refers to the collision with the truck and the subsequent running down of his wife as ‘an accident,’” the judge wrote in his sentencing decision Wednesday.

“He is then quoted as saying, ‘I had a little bit of a buzz, I was tired and the sun was in my eyes.’”

Secondly, Porter had concerns with Clarke’s denial of having an issue with alcohol, though the report referenced issues with it in the past, describing Clarke as being prone to go on weeks-long drinking binges, and indicated Clarke’s own child had told a social worker his father was lying about the alcohol he drank.

“Overall there is a pall of alcohol abuse cast over the matter,” Porter wrote.

A driver who was blinded by the sun would have stopped his vehicle, he added.

“There is no doubt that (Clarke’s) gross intoxication was a significant contributing factor in the collision with both the parked truck and his pedestrian wife.”

On the positive side, the report indicated Clarke, of Little Bay East, had a long history of employment and his own fishery enterprise, the judge noted.

At trial, Clarke’s wife testified she had arrived home at suppertime last May 11 to find Clarke wasn’t there, something she thought was unusual. Worried, she went out to look for him and eventually saw him driving his pickup just outside the community. She walked to a place on the road where another truck was parked in front of a house. The woman said she grew afraid when her husband approached in his truck, since she assumed he had been drinking.

Thinking he was about to hit the parked vehicle, she said she had jumped out in front of her husband’s truck, waving her hands and yelling. The next thing she remembered was landing on the ground and several people helping her.

Police officers went to Clarke’s home, where he emerged from the garage smelling of alcohol and slurring his words. The officers found three guns kept in the garage had not been locked or secured.

Police officers told the court that Clarke had blown more than twice the legal bloodalcohol limit on breathalyzers subsequently given to him at the RCMP detachment.

Clarke’s wife was taken to hospital in Burin and transferred to the Health Sciences Centre in St. John’s. She didn’t provide a victim impact statement to the court, but testified she had been seriously injured when her husband struck her with his truck, sustaining a broken arm and pelvis, a dislocated shoulder, cuts and bruises. Nonetheless, she pleaded for leniency from the court for her husband at his sentencing hearing.

Porter convicted Clarke in February of dangerous driving causing bodily harm, impaired driving causing bodily harm, driving with a blood-alcohol limit over 80 mg causing bodily harm, failure to stop at the scene of an accident and three counts of careless storage of firearms.

At the request of the Crown, the impaired driving charge was stayed under the Kienapple principle — a rule against multiple convictions for the same criminal action.

On Wednesday, the judge sentenced Clarke to 17 months in prison, followed by two years of probation and a three-year driving ban.