A VERDICT in the trial of a 29-year-old who killed a father and son in a hit-and-run collision is expected on Monday.
Dylan John Pounds was guilty of “a plethora of failings” that amounted to dangerous driving rather than careless driving, the prosecution argued in the Royal Court yesterday.
The argument was made during the final day of Mr Pounds’s five-day trial.
He killed 48-year-old father Dean Lowe and his 11-year-old son Charlie in a collision on Rue de Fauvic on the evening of 5 August last year, and has admitted causing their deaths by careless driving.
But he denies the more serious charge of causing death by dangerous driving, which can carry a much longer jail sentence.
He has also admitted failing to stop and report an accident.
In his closing speech, Crown Advocate Matthew Maletroit, prosecuting, argued that there was strong evidence that Mr Pounds had been drinking heavily before driving his van, and was speeding and using his mobile phone as he drove.
Earlier this week the court heard that Mr Pounds had been drinking all afternoon on the day that the crash happened.
Advocate Maletroit said: “There is a plethora of failings on the part of the driver that take this well beyond carelessness and well into dangerousness.”
The Lowe family had been attending a birthday party that evening and Advocate Maletroit said: “Little did they know that it was the last occasion they would ever spend together as a family.”
The prosecution said CCTV footage from inside the Dolphin Hotel in Gorey, as well as the testimony of witnesses, showed that Mr Pounds had been drinking heavily.
The advocate said: “What we have here is a nine-hour drinking session where the defendant drank around nine or ten pints of lager.”
Mobile phone records showed he made a three-minute call just as he pulled out of the Pembroke pub car park in the van.
Advocate Maletroit said: “There was no hands-free set-up in the van. It would have been a distraction at a time when he should have been concentrating on the road.
“He didn’t apply emergency braking, not even when he hit pedestrians, not even when Dean Lowe impacted on the windscreen.”
On the fourth day of the trial, a forensics collision investigator said that the van which knocked down and killed the father and son was travelling at more than 10mph above the speed limit. Rob Manners, a forensics collision investigator with the States police, said Mr Pounds had not slowed down after the collision but “continued to accelerate”.
In his closing speech, Advocate Ian Jones, defending, said that there was uncertainty about the identity of a van seen speeding that night.
He said: “Can you be sure that that was the van? You can’t.”
He added: “You cannot be sure that Mr Pounds was on the phone. You may think he might have been. But ‘might have been’ is not good enough.”
He also said that the evidence of Mr Pounds’s friend Callum Best was unreliable because he had been unable to remember certain details.
Mr Best previously told the court that he and Mr Pounds had gone to the Union Inn on Grande Route de Saint Jean and had each had a bacon roll – which was all they ate that day.
Advocate Jones said: “You can only be sure that Mr Pounds consumed one pint.”
The verdict is expected on Monday. Deputy Bailiff Robert MacRae is presiding and Jurats Jane Ronge and Karen Le Cornu were sitting to hear the case.
