I’m sorry I can’t jail you for longer
Judge’s regret over hit and run driver who hurled victim 60ft
A JUDGE apologised that he could not jail a hit and run driver for longer yesterday for smashing into a pedestrian and catapulting him 60ft down the road. Adam McDermott, 33, was speeding around a corner on the wrong side of the road when he ploughed into a father of three crossing the street, flipping his body into the air like a rag doll.
CCTV footage captured the sickening moment the builder, who did not have a driving licence or insurance, roared off in his fiancée’s car as Andrew Payne cartwheeled over the bonnet before landing headfirst. Mr Payne survived the crash in Brighton on January 14 last year but suffered serious injuries and was in hospital for six days with bleeds on the brain and a punctured lung. Almost two years on the energy meter reader, who was making house calls at the time, still has pain.
Yesterday Judge Charles Kemp hit out at the ‘grossly inadequate’ sentencing powers for the offence of causing serious injury by dangerous driving.
It meant he could only jail McDermott for four years as he had to give him credit for his guilty plea, reducing his sentence from the maximum five-year penalty.
Brighton Crown Court heard that McDermott has an ‘ appalling’ criminal record with 47 previous convictions for 114 offences.
He later tried to torch the Fiat 500 he had borrowed from his fiancée Robyn Burns. Judge Kemp said it was ‘remarkable’ he could not lock him up for longer for the crash and gave McDermott an additional two and a half years for perverting the course of justice, taking his total sentence to six and a half years. Addressing Mr
‘How could he drive off?’
Payne, Judge Kemp said the sentence would bring ‘no satisfaction or compensate’ for his immense trauma. ‘Five years for this offence is grossly inadequate,’ he said.
In his victim impact statement Mr Payne, who cannot bear to watch CCTV of the crash, said: ‘I still cannot understand, as a human being, how the driver could mow me down, without even braking, and drive off leaving me for dead.’
Burns, 30, who was then a fraud investigator for Lloyds Bank, lied to police that her car must have been stolen. She has a child with McDermott and was given an 18month suspended sentence for perverting the course of justice.
McDermott refused to leave his cell for the sentencing hearing as it was revealed he is already in custody for stealing a laptop and threatening a security guard with a knife at the Lakeside shopping centre in Essex.
Clark Walker, 33, was jailed for two and a half years for perverting the course of justice after he attempted to help McDermott torch the car.