Drink-driver ‘would have been jailed if she were a man’

A DRINK-DRIVER who caused a pileup has escaped jail ‘becasue she is not a man’.

Judge Sarah Buckingham said “alcoholic” Victoria Parry would have been “straight down the stairs” to prison had she been a man.

Parry, 30, who already had two previous convictions for drink-driving, was dragged from her Fiat Stilo after it caught fire following the pile-up on the A46 near Stratford-upon-Avon last May.

Tests showed she was almost three times over the drink-drive limit, while Warwick Crown Court heard she had been drinking up to two bottles of wine a day. Parry – left with a “considerable drink problem” after a 15-year abusive relationship – had also been banned from driving for three years in July 2015 for her second excess alcohol offence.

But the judge delayed sentencing Parry for three months in April after she admitted a charge of dangerous driving. She had said: “If Miss Parry was a man, there is no question it would have been straight down the stairs, because this is a shocking case of dangerous driving against a background of two previous convictions for excess alcohol. But this offence was committed in May 2018 and she has not been in trouble since. She has clearly got an alcohol problem.

“She is, whether she admits not, an alcoholic.”

Parry has now received an 18-month jail sentence, suspended for two years.

Deferring sentence earlier, Judge Buckingham had told Parry: “You richly deserve an immediate custodial sentence of 18 months.

“I want to see whether you can really address the issues rather than paying lip service.”

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Parry’s lawyer Kane Sharpe had said his client had “positively engaged” with all the judge’s conditional requirements, including abstaining from alcohol, attending daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and seeking private counselling.

The crash happened at around 6.50pm on May 23 after Parry overtook in the middle of the road in the face of oncoming traffic on the A46 Stratford by-pass. Parry, of Grange Road, Bearley, Stratford-upon-Avon, told an off-duty police officer she had drunk a bottle of wine and “shouldn’t be driving”, the court heard.

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