Husband f lipped car in row over wife’s bad driving
He yanked handbrake to get her to stop
A HUSBAND flipped the family car by pulling the handbrake on when his wife was at the wheel after deciding she was unfit to drive.
Steven Oldfield’s actions as his wife Catherine accelerated caused the car to clip the kerb and slide along the road on its side before rolling on to its roof.
Both suffered minor injuries and Mr Oldfield was arrested at the scene. He insisted that what he did was reasonable and that he had no choice but to pull on the brake, but he was convicted last year of causing danger to road users by interfering with a motor vehicle.
Yesterday he lost an appeal against the conviction but vowed to fight on to clear his name.
The Oldfields were in their Kia Rio on the way to a rugby match in April 2013, with her driving, when he says they had a ‘catastrophic disagreement’ over her handling of the car and he pulled on the brake when she wouldn’t stop and let him out.
Mr Oldfield, of Southsea, was given a community order, with 100 hours of unpaid work, at Portsmouth Crown Court in August last year although that sentence was later dropped down to a conditional discharge.
He says the conviction has blighted his life and destroyed his business and asked London’s Appeal Court to clear his name.
The couple were driving to Fratton train station in Portsmouth on their way to the Army and Navy rugby match at Twickenham on April 27 2013.
Judge Roger Hetherington, at the Crown Court, described how a ‘rather heated argument’ broke out between the couple over arrangements for picking up or meeting others en route. Mr Oldfield eventually decided that he wanted to get out of the vehicle and ‘shouted at his wife to stop the car’.
Outside the Appeal Court, he said emotions in the car had been running high after a family funeral the day before the accident.
‘I decided she was unfit to drive and told her we’d missed our train anyway. I tried to stop the car with the handbrake. I had no choice.’ Passing sentence on Mr Oldfield, Judge Hetherington had told him: ‘It was fortunate indeed that someone was not seriously injured. It was fortunate that no other bystanders or other vehicles were damaged or injured in any way.
‘Nevertheless it was a highly irresponsible thing to have done, for which there was no excuse whatsoever, and it could have caused a very serious accident.’
Addressing the Appeal Court, Mr Oldfield criticised the accuracy of police evidence and insisted that his behaviour was reasonable.
But Lady Justice Rafferty, sitting with Mr Justice William Davis and Judge David Stockdale QC, said: ‘The issue for the jury was very simple. Did Mr Oldfield have any reasonable cause to pull on the handbrake and did he do it in circumstances which it would have been obvious to a reasonable person were dangerous?’
Mr Oldfield had breached his ‘clear duty’ to behave safely on the roads and there were ‘no grounds’ on which to successfully challenge the jury’s verdict.
Outside court Mr Oldfield said he would now take his case before the Criminal Cases Review Commission.
He added: ‘ What happened has destroyed my business. I’m a sound engineer and we worked a lot in schools and, after this, the phone just stopped ringing.’ He and his wife are still together.