According to Ynet, this driver was caught speeding 51 kmph over the speed limit. He was caught by the police using a laser gun reading his speed, and his driver's license was immediately suspended for 30 days.
During Operation Pillar of Defense, this taxi driver was driving in between Red Alert sirens. You can imagine how harried he must have felt, along with so many other people, trying to get to cover every few minutes with tens of rockets shot at Israel, the majority of them in southern Israel, every day.
When the driver went to court, he asked the court to take into account the special circumstances that everywhere he went there were sirens and he was scared. He says he even knew that on the road on which he was caught there are regularly police, but he drove there anyway, and he drove fast, because of the pressure he was under due to the incessant sirens.
He asked the courts to take that into account and to cancel the ticket and give him his license back.
Unfortunately for him, the prosecutors pulled out his records and discovered that this driver has had plenty of speeding tickets in the past, and was involved in a traffic accident a couple of years ago. Considering his many tickets and four serious speeding tickets along with three accidents in the past 15 years, the judge rejected his petition.
You can only use the rockets as an excuse if you were a fairly safe and patient driver prior to the rockets.
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Not fair. I read about two incidents in which people had heard the siren, stopped the car or bus, and took shelter - and were injured lightly from shrapnel. If they would not have stopped, they would have not been around when the rocket fell.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, a friend of mine was driving on the highway near Sderot a few years ago and a kassam landed immediately to his rear so that he had damage, but personally was safe.
josh
he didnt claim that at the time of the ticket he was running from a rocket attack, just that the general atmosphere of the attacks and sirens made him nervous and caused his driving habits to change.
ReplyDeletehad he been a person with a decent driving record, maybe the judge would have accepted the claim, but he had a lousy record anyway, so the judge didnt accept the argument that it was the atmosphere of the rockets that caused it,..
btw, there were plenty of incidents in the news of cars and buses that sustained hits by rockets, or were very close to where rockets fell, that were seriously damaged. anybody inside could have been hurt badly.