The "moment of madness" defence crops up in London

We see that in London a lorry driver managed to avoid any penalty for reversing over someone in a lorry with the reverse beep disabled, the reversing camera broken and the mirrors set up wrong - by playing the "moment of madness" defence:

Defence counsel Matthew Hardyman told the court his client had suffered from a “moment of madness”

There must be some legal symposium we must attend on "effective use of the 'moment of madness' defence", with speakers discussing how they used to explain various celebrities about engaging in a bit of paid or consensual sex with strangers -which is a key part of Stokes Croft's nightlife- or how they used it to explain some road-rage incident.

I you search for "told the court" and "moment of madness", it does seem to crop up surprisingly often.

In this particular case, however, we have a question for the defence: how you explain the failure of three separate safety devices as "a moment of madness", We'd love to know that -so the next time we get pulled over on the M4 roadworks for having defective lights, brakes, rear tyres and wing mirrors that are montpelier-normal, but which the traffic officer considered "missing".

Can you imagine explaining to the officer asking "why is your vehicle so unsafe" that the decision to drive from Stokes Croft to Birmingham in a vehicle in that state was "a moment of madness"?

It just wouldn't work, would it? MoM is the excuse for "being caught in-flagrante", a bit of road-rage, or "stabbing a relative to death".

The correct response when asked by the police why your van or lorry is unsafe is "I am a donor to the Conservative party and a part time magistrate". Works every time.

Not the "moment of madness" defence again

The Former Bristol Evening Post has an article about someone disqualified from driving, caught by the police's ANPR camera in an unmarked car and then going for a sprint round Hanham, nearly hitting an oncoming cyclist and then crashing into bollards.

IT "was a moment of madness"

Some observations

1. There's nothing wrong with nearly hitting an oncoming cyclist, in fact is a common and necessary operation in our cities.
2. Bollards are the cause of many of the accidents in our cities.
3. ANPR camera recognition hooked up to insurance and registration checkers are another example of the surveillance and nanny state at work. That's a bit like those in house baby-intercoms, for anyone  wondering what a "surveillance nanny state is".

Our key observation is this though: that moment of madness defence is getting ever  more boring. 

If you look at its origin, being caught in engaging in consensual sex in a public place -and who doesn't do that from time to time?- what it really means is "it is unfortunate that this particular time  I was caught by a police force who consider what I was doing to be illegal". The probability of being caught with your kit off in public is surprisingly low, based on our experiments, so the M-o-M defence is pretty weak there. We say:  own up and say 'so what?'.

Which is precisely what the driver should have done here. Disqualified, no insurance, unregistered car, driving badly: so what?

As it is the judged has recognised the "moment of madness" defence is wearing thin:

 "This was more than a moment of madness. It was six or seven minutes of extremely bad driving. It's pure luck you didn't injure or kill someone."

Again, six to seven minutes of extremely bad driving where it pure luck you didn't injure or kill someone? That's the school run summarised in a single sentence.

Moments of Madness

Last month we covered how the bus driver accused of deliberately running over a cyclist outside the magistrates court was in court over the incident.

The news is now out that he's been sentenced to 17 months in jail after pleading guilty to dangerous driving and GBH, which, given the video, was hard to defeat with the "I didn't see him" defence.

The video is pretty awful for anyone to watch: if you want to know what it looks like when a bus sideswipes someone on a bicycle -when the bus isn't even going that fast.


The evening post says that the bus driver, Gavin Hill, has been disqualified from driving for 30 months, and will have to take an extended driving test afterwards. Apparently the action was "a moment of madness".

Well, we hope that Phil isn't suffering long-term consequences, and that the outcome does provide some reassurance that society frowns on such explicit attempts to cause death and injury.

Now, let us turn to today's other "moment of madness", this time by one David Lowrey, of Kingsway, St George, where the Evening Post says:   A VIOLENT motorist beat up a cyclist by the side of the road before getting someone to lie for him as he tried to escape conviction..

When we heard the "someone to lie for him" phrase we checked to see if David Lowrey was on the coalition cabinet, but no, he was someone who started a fight with someone on a bicycle who had the audacity to make some kind of gesture to the car as the car encroached into the cycle lane.

Again, "a moment of madness", this time with four months jail; no mention of driving penalty or what penalty he or the "independent witness" get for trying to pervert the course of justice (*)

If these court cases weren't in the papers on the same day, the "moment of madness" defence might sound somewhat realistic. As it is, it comes out looking a contrived.

For that reason, we had a look around to see where else the "moment of madness" defence had cropped up.

• Ron Davies, welsh secretary, robbed at knifepoint by a some people he went down to Clapham Common  with"a moment of madness"
• Sir John Guielgud, set up by the police who actually had undercover police trying to entrap men seeking a bit of discreet consensual sex, again "a moment of madness".
• Hugh Grant getting caught paying a prostitute for a bit of entertainment in a public lavatory while on a business trip without his wife.

There we have it then, two separate scenarios where defence lawyers recommend the "moment of madness" defence

1. You've rammed or assaulted someone on a bicycle and want to make it clear that normally you are a safe and docile driver and suddenly "a moment of madness" came over you. You didn't mean to cause physical injury and hope to be let off lightly.
2. You got caught by the police engaged in some outdoor sex act which the legal system at that time and place considered illegal. You want to imply that the fact the police caught you with your trousers down was not because you do it very often but because you "had a moment of madness" and you were very unlucky. You also don't want your political/acting/religious career ruined, so you have to pretend it was somehow an accident.

There you have it then, two situations where the "moment of madness" defence crops up. Can we note, then, that for the second of these sets of legal cases, nobody gets hurt. In fact, most of the participants in the situations seemed, at least to an extent, engaged in consensual acts. Whereas nobody volunteers to be run over by a bus at the bearpit, or head-butted by a complete stranger.

Either way, it's become a bit of a cliche. Please, defence lawyers, come up with some new phrase.

(*) On the topic of independent witnesses, can we remind everyone that not only do ex-spouses turn on you, but if you are having someone pretend to be a complete stranger so as to devalue the line up evidence, remember that as covered in Ugander et al., The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph, it's fairly easy to determine if the pairwise distance between you and the independent witness is only one or two hops, or the you are both parts of the same clique of acquaintances. Less formally: you can't say "I have never met this person" if you keep identifying each other as friends in facebook photos.

Update: for anyone in the mainstream media who is not actually appearing in the Leveson inquiry or in a 1:1 meeting with Don Murdoch, trying to contact us -please read more than one article on this site, especially the media corner, before emailing us. You will discover that you wouldn't consider us a serious and unbiased news outlet. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how we view the television and printed news outlets.