Anne Sacoolas was right to run

THE CIA is good at making people disappear from one place and pop up in another, even if the other place is, in normal circumstances, some kind of unnamed black prison on Diego Garcia.
This special set of skills came in handy recently, when a 43-year-old woman named Anne Sacoolas had the misfortune to knock down and kill a motorcyclist on a country road near Brackley.
On 27th August, Mrs Sacoolas was leaving RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire, the base where her husband – who we can fairly safely assume works for the CIA – was stationed.
Coming past the guardhouse, she turned right onto the B4031 and drove off down the road. About twenty seconds later, a motorbike appeared from around a sharp bend and ploughed straight into the front of her car. The 19-year- old rider, petrol station attendant Harry Dunn, was flung over the top of the Volvo. It is regrettably very easy to kill a biker with a Volvo, and Harry Dunn died shortly afterwards by the roadside.
This kind of tragedy would be bad enough for Harry’s family in any circumstances. What made it worse is that Mrs Sacoolas, who at that point had been in the UK for three weeks, had turned out of the base onto the wrong side of the road, and driven for around 400 yards without noticing. It was only when Harry’s bike came round the corner – far too late for either of them to take evasive action– that she will have become aware of her deadly mistake.
Northamptonshire Police spoke to Mrs Sacoolas, who explained the circumstances, admitted liability and told officers that her husband’s job at RAF Croughton conferred diplomatic status on the family, under a 1994 agreement between the US and UK Governments. She also confirmed that no, she had no plans to leave the country any time soon.
Those plans soon changed. When the police contacted the US Embassy to request a waiver of Anne Sacoolas’ diplomatic immunity, so that she could be questioned and if necessary prosecuted, they were told she had already been spirited out of the country. And no, there would be no waiver in any event.
You don’t have to be one of Harry Dunn’s grieving family to feel the unfairness of this. It is an abuse of diplomatic immunity, which is designed to protect the diplomatic system by preventing the politically-motivated harassment of diplomats, rather than the individual interests of any member of diplomatic staff who happens to commit a serious offence.
But Anne Sacoolas is sensible not to return. If she does, she will probably be sent, pointlessly, to gaol. Sentencing guidelines for the offence of causing death by careless driving (which charge the police have indicated she faces) would indicate a starting point of 36 weeks imprisonment in her case. The CIA made the right call in getting her well away from one of the most conspicuously unfair laws to disgrace the statute book.
The offence was enacted in 2006 after a campaign in The Sun complaining that ‘killer drivers’ were getting off more or less scot-free, with some derisory fine for careless driving. The law was changed, so it is now a specific offence to cause someone’s death if at the time your driving fell ‘below the standard of a careful and competent driver’. The penalty for ‘death by careless’ is up to five years in prison.
Around half of all adults in the UK drive a car. The training necessary to pass a driving test is rudimentary. When 33.6 million people each take control of two tons of metal moving at twenty-five metres per second, mistakes will happen and accidents are inevitable. Every driver reading this will have made some error behind the wheel.
There is no moral difference between a trivial driving error that passes off without anyone noticing, and one which by pure chance results in someone’s death. ‘Killer drivers’ can be anyone making a minor error whose luck is worse than yours. If Anne Sacoolas’s son, who was sitting next to her in the car, had immediately said “Mom, you’re on the wrong side of the road!” they might have laughed about it later. Instead, whether or not she ever faces a British court, this event will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.
It is easy to understand how a bereaved relative may want the closure of seeing the other party to a fatal accident locked up, but the law operates on facts, not feelings. We should punish people for doing things they know to be wrong, or for deliberately taking unnecessary risks, not for making mistakes. Sending people like Anne Sacoolas who have accidents to prison doesn’t deter anyone else from having an accident.
Harry’s family –whose composure and dignity in all this has been astonishing– have campaigned valiantly to secure Mrs Sacoolas’s return to the UK to face the music, but their campaign seems certain to fail. On Wednesday, President Trump made the helpful observation that the accident was, broadly speaking, the fault of the Limeys and their stupid roads: “That can happen…I won’t say it ever happened to me, but it did. When you get used to driving on our system and you’re all of a sudden on the other system, where you’re driving, it happens.”
America’s decision to abuse diplomatic immunity to protect its citizen from UK law demonstrates three things. First, the astonishing hypocrisy of the US State Department, which in 1997 was swift to (successfully) request a waiver of immunity in the case of a Georgian Charge d’ Affaires who ploughed into a row of cars in Washington and killed a teenage girl.
Second, that the offence of ‘death by careless’ is unfair and should be repealed.
Finally, whatever the empty talk of a special relationship, it flags up the massive imbalance of power between the UK and the US, and not only in matters of extradition. Whoever ends up negotiating the second easiest trade deal in history should remember what happens, every time American and British interests cross.