A HIGH-PROFILE lawyer who was jailed for seven months for drink-driving, crashing into another car and leaving the scene has been told his sentence was not excessive by the Royal Court.
David Steenson was sentenced by the Magistrate’s Court in August, but swiftly sought to appeal against the jail term – arguing that a community service order could have been issued instead.
The Royal Court dismissed his appeal and has now outlined its reasons for doing so.
Steenson admitting failing to stop after an accident, drink-driving, and two counts of dangerous driving.
He collided with a white Mini Cooper in which a woman and her daughter were travelling, and drove for more than a mile from the scene of the accident on Route de St Jean. No one suffered serious injuries. The police were able to track the Advocate by the marks left on the road from his damaged Jaguar.
While acknowledging that Steenson “undoubtedly had available to him substantial mitigation”, the Royal Court said the facts of his offending were “stark”.
The Royal Court judgement read: “The appellant knowingly after drinking alcohol got behind the wheel of his car in fading light to drive home. At that moment, he chose to take a risk or failed to give the faintest thought to members of the public who might be using the road and put them at risk.
“He was involved in a serious collision which could only have happened because of the dangerous nature of his driving immediately prior to and at the accident. He crossed the centre line of the road and struck an oncoming vehicle causing significant damage to it.
“He was so impaired in his judgment that the Relief Magistrate accepted that he did not know that he had struck a vehicle, thinking rather that he had struck a wall or a kerb. He drove on from the scene of the accident with extensive damage to the front offside wheel of his car.
“So extensive was the damage that police officers were able to track the passage of the appellant’s vehicle, for a little over a mile, by the marks that it had left on the road. It is clear that he had turned off the main road and he had had to turn his vehicle on at least three occasions to reach the point he did when ultimately the vehicle stopped.”
“The Relief Magistrate considered the offending to be too serious to either impose a non-custodial sentence by way of community service, or to suspend a sentence of imprisonment. The Relief Magistrate would have had in mind the injuries suffered by the occupants of the vehicle with which the appellant collided and, perhaps particularly relevant in considering the possibility of community service, the fact that only some ten days previously the appellant had ended a period of community service for an offence of a different nature, but in respect of which alcohol had been a significant factor.”
Steenson had a previous conviction for assaulting a taxi driver while drunk on the night of 13 November, for which he had been sentenced to 130 hours of community service and ordered to pay £2,420.
The Royal Court continued: “The sentence itself was within the boundaries of the guidelines set out in the Magistrate’s Court Sentencing Guidelines.
“We reminded ourselves that it was not our job to seek to substitute the sentence imposed by the Magistrate unless we took the view that the tests for overturning that sentence set out above had been passed. We could not take that view and accordingly we upheld the Relief Magistrate’s sentence and dismissed the appeal.”
The Bailiff, Sir Timothy Le Cocq, was presiding with Jurats Averty and Opfermann.
