When Kerry Dean’s son Sean was found dead on the central reservation of the A444 in Warwickshire in the early hours of 2 September 2012, he had his hand curled up near his face in the position he had adopted to soothe himself since he was a baby. In the two and a half years since police came to her door to tell her that Sean had been hit by a car and was dead, the image of Sean – a 20-year-old student who lost his trousers in the force of the crash – being left to die alone and half-naked at the roadside has haunted his mother.
Less than an hour after Sean was struck as he walked home after a night out in Nuneaton with friends, one of the passengers in the car that hit him returned to the scene.
Later that morning, after the road was closed and the death reported by local media, the driver of the car, Mandeep Singh Gill, also came back. But he did not hand himself in to police until 2.30pm, when he was tested and found to have alcohol and drugs in his system.
In October 2013, following a police investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash, Gill was jailed for dealing drugs. The following month he pleaded guilty to failing to stop at the scene of an accident and was sentenced to 16 weeks plus a 12-month driving ban, which the judge decided should run concurrently with his three-and-a-half-year drugs sentence. Gill can expect to be released in the next few months, on the same date as if he had never been convicted of a driving offence.
“The worst thing is that in the eyes of the law Sean’s death was not important,” his mother says. “If you kill someone in a car it’s not deemed as serious as punching someone, and I think that’s wrong. I’m not talking about people being jailed for life if someone steps out in the road in front of them, but people who text while driving, or speed, or drive when drunk or drugged. Just because someone has been killed by a car or a lorry doesn’t make it less of a death than if they’ve been killed by a knife or a gun. Some days I wake up and think it must be a bad dream. This guy will be out in March or April, but our world will never be the same.”
Before her son was killed, Kerry Dean did not give much thought to the laws governing road traffic. She has become an expert. Changes she would like to see include the introduction of a specific hit-and-run offence, to be tried in the Crown court, in cases of death or serious injury. Currently the only charges for hit-and-run drivers are leaving the scene of an accident or failing to report, with a maximum sentence of six months.
Dean is highly critical of the Crown Prosecution Service’s handling of Gill’s case, in particular the lack of support for her family, who she says felt intimidated by the defendant’s supporters and were at one point chased outside court. She was angered by the coroner’s verdict of “accidental death” and believes the newly created verdict of “death by road collision” should be more widely used.
She thinks it is wrong that for passengers in cars involved in collisions, there is no obligation to do anything. Only by concealing information do they become guilty of perverting the course of justice. Under the law, leaving an injured person in the road without calling an ambulance – as Gill’s two passengers did – is allowed.
Few people could avoid being dismayed by Kerry Dean’s story. But if the circumstances of Sean Morley’s death are more extreme and disturbing than most other road deaths, he is far from unusual in having left behind him a family bewildered and enraged by the way the police, CPS and courts have treated them.
“You don’t know who to go to, who to talk to,” says Dean, who gave up her job after her son’s death and now works part-time for friends. “We were treated in that courtroom as if we were completely irrelevant. I’ve never felt so frightened.”
The government does not collect figures on the number of people killed by law-breaking drivers. Overall, the number of road crash fatalities in Britain as a whole continues to fall, and at 1,713 in 2013 (the last year for which figures are available) is about half what it was 10 years ago. But it is left to campaigners to calculate what proportion of crashes are the consequence of criminality and to highlight the fact that drivers have benefited more than other road-user groups from recent safety improvements.
Last month, the Labour party announced proposals for a new victims’ law, but it is not clear if this would help the victims of law-breaking drivers who feel they are unfairly penalised by existing rules. The Victims’ Code, for example, requiring police to keep victims informed about investigations, only applies to crimes that meet the National Crime Recording Standard. While this includes shoplifting and electricity theft, it excludes drunk driving and speeding.
Ten years ago, speeding was the commonest type of antisocial behaviour. Today, it has been recategorised by the Crime Survey for England and Wales as “vehicle-related behaviour” along with illegal parking. Meanwhile, the charge of causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving, introduced in 2008 with a view to increasing the overall number of prosecutions, is now used more often than the dangerous driving charge it was meant to supplement.
John Thompson, whose son Jake was killed on a crossing in Bristol in 2011 by a speeding lorry driver, and whose complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission led to officers being given “advice” about their conduct, believes the driver who killed his son would never have been tried for causing death by careless driving if the family had not hired their own solicitor. In court, a judge directed the jury to deliver a not-guilty verdict.
Thompson highlights the generally lower standards of road death investigations compared with investigations of other deaths. “It does shake your faith to be honest,” he says. In London, the Metropolitan police said in 2013 that it spends almost eight times as much investigating homicides as road deaths. The force declined to be interviewed for this article, but Acting Detective Superintendent John Oldham of the Road and Transport Policing Command said in a statement that the force “treats all collisions as serious and urgent matters, and the investigations remain a priority”.
Amy Aeron-Thomas, executive director of the victims’ charity Roadpeace, is concerned about the impact of budget cuts and says a forthcoming review of driving offences is long overdue. She points to cases in which families believe ageism is a factor, such as that of Janet Wilton, who was 91 when she died after being knocked down on a zebra crossing in Gloucester in 2009 by a driver who said she had not seen her. Wilton died from her injuries more than two months after the crash, but her daughter, Janferie Wilton, says there would not have been a postmortem had she not insisted. Janferie received an apology from the CPS, but there was no prosecution.
For Lynne and Chris Head, whose son Gregory died in 2009 after being hit on a zebra crossing in Croydon, the problems began at the scene of the crash. The Heads say that police showed little interest in the circumstances or the driver, Darron Williams, until their son died without regaining consciousness five months later. Because it was more than 30 days after the collision, his death is excluded from official road-death statistics.
Williams, who stopped at the scene, was not charged until 11 months after the crash and was acquitted of causing death by careless driving, driving without insurance and perverting the course of justice, with a second trial held five years after the crash. The Heads believe the CPS made a mistake in allowing the charges against Williams to be split, so he was tried for causing death by careless driving by a jury that was never told he was also accused of perverting the course of justice, driving without insurance and having failed to declare that he was visually impaired. The prosecution allowed this final charge to be dropped at last year’s trial, which meant the Heads never heard Williams’s defence.
Chris Head says he had to “beg” a judge to let him read out a statement, and ask counsel to use Gregory’s name rather than referring to “the boy” (he was 23). Like Kerry Dean, they felt intimidated by the defendant’s supporters who they say questioned their right to be in court: “At no stage did we feel we were being helped to understand what was happening. No one explained anything.”
At home in Croydon, where Greg’s ashes are buried in the garden, his parents still feel trapped in the nightmare of his death. “We’re not angry any more – the anger wasn’t taking us anywhere,” says Chris Head. “But there is despair when you read about other cases that no progress is being made in this area. Nobody has focused on the victims. It’s devastating – more so when you know there’s no justice.”
Campaigners believe the problems in relation to road-crash deaths are systemic; that investigations are less thorough, that there is a lack of transparency about charging decisions, that victims are poorly treated and sentences unduly lax, particularly with regard to driving bans.
Feminist campaigners use the term “victim blaming” to describe the process whereby responsibility for sexual offences is shifted away from perpetrators, particularly in rape trials. In recent years, some transport campaigners have begun using the same term, and have successfully moved safety for cyclists up the agenda. A report last month on the investigation and prosecution of road crash deaths was the result of this heightened awareness, says a spokesperson for the attorney general, Jeremy Wright. The report criticised the CPS for poor communication with families and called for new training for specialist prosecutors. The government is also looking at plans to extend the right for people to appeal against sentences viewed as too lenient to include drivers who have killed.
But if blaming women for sex crimes is symptomatic of sexism, how should we understand the blaming of road-traffic victims? Could it be that, unlike in trials of people accused of using guns or knives, many of us (juries, judges, police officers, journalists) find it all too easy to imagine being the defendants in such cases? Do we secretly sympathise with the driver who ran a red light, drove too fast or sent a text at the wheel? Is the consequence that we do not feel or think enough about the victims of these crimes?
The day after our interview, Kerry Dean emailed me. “I do not believe a driver is not guilty if he says he did not see a pedestrian if that person is hit by the front of the car,” she wrote. “When you drive, should you not be looking in the direction you are going?”
A pathologist told Kerry Dean her son probably never regained consciousness after being knocked down. He could have curled his hand up to his face as a kind of reflex, even though he was unconscious. It provides some solace to his mother, to think that Sean never knew he had been left to die alone in the dark at the side of the road.
• This article was amended on 9 March 2015 to correct the county in the opening paragraph.
The text passage is a news article that discusses the case of Sean Morley, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the subsequent legal proceedings. It also highlights the broader issues surrounding road traffic accidents, the treatment of victims, and the perceived leniency in the justice system.
no_question

the passage does not contain any mathematical questions or calculations. it is primarily focused on the narrative of sean morley's death and the broader issues related to road traffic accidents and the justice system.
Given a text passage, determine:
    1. If it contains a mathematical question (including word problems or calculations)
    2. If an answer to that mathematical question is provided in the text

First, describe the content structure you found in 1-2 sentences.

Then provide your analysis in the following format:
TYPE: <one of the following values>
- NO_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION_WITH_ANSWER
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS_WITH_ANSWERS
system
When Kerry Dean’s son Sean was found dead on the central reservation of the A444 in Warwickshire in the early hours of 2 September 2012, he had his hand curled up near his face in the position he had adopted to soothe himself since he was a baby. In the two and a half years since police came to her door to tell her that Sean had been hit by a car and was dead, the image of Sean – a 20-year-old student who lost his trousers in the force of the crash – being left to die alone and half-naked at the roadside has haunted his mother.
Less than an hour after Sean was struck as he walked home after a night out in Nuneaton with friends, one of the passengers in the car that hit him returned to the scene.
Later that morning, after the road was closed and the death reported by local media, the driver of the car, Mandeep Singh Gill, also came back. But he did not hand himself in to police until 2.30pm, when he was tested and found to have alcohol and drugs in his system.
In October 2013, following a police investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash, Gill was jailed for dealing drugs. The following month he pleaded guilty to failing to stop at the scene of an accident and was sentenced to 16 weeks plus a 12-month driving ban, which the judge decided should run concurrently with his three-and-a-half-year drugs sentence. Gill can expect to be released in the next few months, on the same date as if he had never been convicted of a driving offence.
“The worst thing is that in the eyes of the law Sean’s death was not important,” his mother says. “If you kill someone in a car it’s not deemed as serious as punching someone, and I think that’s wrong. I’m not talking about people being jailed for life if someone steps out in the road in front of them, but people who text while driving, or speed, or drive when drunk or drugged. Just because someone has been killed by a car or a lorry doesn’t make it less of a death than if they’ve been killed by a knife or a gun. Some days I wake up and think it must be a bad dream. This guy will be out in March or April, but our world will never be the same.”
Before her son was killed, Kerry Dean did not give much thought to the laws governing road traffic. She has become an expert. Changes she would like to see include the introduction of a specific hit-and-run offence, to be tried in the Crown court, in cases of death or serious injury. Currently the only charges for hit-and-run drivers are leaving the scene of an accident or failing to report, with a maximum sentence of six months.
Dean is highly critical of the Crown Prosecution Service’s handling of Gill’s case, in particular the lack of support for her family, who she says felt intimidated by the defendant’s supporters and were at one point chased outside court. She was angered by the coroner’s verdict of “accidental death” and believes the newly created verdict of “death by road collision” should be more widely used.
She thinks it is wrong that for passengers in cars involved in collisions, there is no obligation to do anything. Only by concealing information do they become guilty of perverting the course of justice. Under the law, leaving an injured person in the road without calling an ambulance – as Gill’s two passengers did – is allowed.
Few people could avoid being dismayed by Kerry Dean’s story. But if the circumstances of Sean Morley’s death are more extreme and disturbing than most other road deaths, he is far from unusual in having left behind him a family bewildered and enraged by the way the police, CPS and courts have treated them.
“You don’t know who to go to, who to talk to,” says Dean, who gave up her job after her son’s death and now works part-time for friends. “We were treated in that courtroom as if we were completely irrelevant. I’ve never felt so frightened.”
The government does not collect figures on the number of people killed by law-breaking drivers. Overall, the number of road crash fatalities in Britain as a whole continues to fall, and at 1,713 in 2013 (the last year for which figures are available) is about half what it was 10 years ago. But it is left to campaigners to calculate what proportion of crashes are the consequence of criminality and to highlight the fact that drivers have benefited more than other road-user groups from recent safety improvements.
Last month, the Labour party announced proposals for a new victims’ law, but it is not clear if this would help the victims of law-breaking drivers who feel they are unfairly penalised by existing rules. The Victims’ Code, for example, requiring police to keep victims informed about investigations, only applies to crimes that meet the National Crime Recording Standard. While this includes shoplifting and electricity theft, it excludes drunk driving and speeding.
Ten years ago, speeding was the commonest type of antisocial behaviour. Today, it has been recategorised by the Crime Survey for England and Wales as “vehicle-related behaviour” along with illegal parking. Meanwhile, the charge of causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving, introduced in 2008 with a view to increasing the overall number of prosecutions, is now used more often than the dangerous driving charge it was meant to supplement.
John Thompson, whose son Jake was killed on a crossing in Bristol in 2011 by a speeding lorry driver, and whose complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission led to officers being given “advice” about their conduct, believes the driver who killed his son would never have been tried for causing death by careless driving if the family had not hired their own solicitor. In court, a judge directed the jury to deliver a not-guilty verdict.
Thompson highlights the generally lower standards of road death investigations compared with investigations of other deaths. “It does shake your faith to be honest,” he says. In London, the Metropolitan police said in 2013 that it spends almost eight times as much investigating homicides as road deaths. The force declined to be interviewed for this article, but Acting Detective Superintendent John Oldham of the Road and Transport Policing Command said in a statement that the force “treats all collisions as serious and urgent matters, and the investigations remain a priority”.
Amy Aeron-Thomas, executive director of the victims’ charity Roadpeace, is concerned about the impact of budget cuts and says a forthcoming review of driving offences is long overdue. She points to cases in which families believe ageism is a factor, such as that of Janet Wilton, who was 91 when she died after being knocked down on a zebra crossing in Gloucester in 2009 by a driver who said she had not seen her. Wilton died from her injuries more than two months after the crash, but her daughter, Janferie Wilton, says there would not have been a postmortem had she not insisted. Janferie received an apology from the CPS, but there was no prosecution.
For Lynne and Chris Head, whose son Gregory died in 2009 after being hit on a zebra crossing in Croydon, the problems began at the scene of the crash. The Heads say that police showed little interest in the circumstances or the driver, Darron Williams, until their son died without regaining consciousness five months later. Because it was more than 30 days after the collision, his death is excluded from official road-death statistics.
Williams, who stopped at the scene, was not charged until 11 months after the crash and was acquitted of causing death by careless driving, driving without insurance and perverting the course of justice, with a second trial held five years after the crash. The Heads believe the CPS made a mistake in allowing the charges against Williams to be split, so he was tried for causing death by careless driving by a jury that was never told he was also accused of perverting the course of justice, driving without insurance and having failed to declare that he was visually impaired. The prosecution allowed this final charge to be dropped at last year’s trial, which meant the Heads never heard Williams’s defence.
Chris Head says he had to “beg” a judge to let him read out a statement, and ask counsel to use Gregory’s name rather than referring to “the boy” (he was 23). Like Kerry Dean, they felt intimidated by the defendant’s supporters who they say questioned their right to be in court: “At no stage did we feel we were being helped to understand what was happening. No one explained anything.”
At home in Croydon, where Greg’s ashes are buried in the garden, his parents still feel trapped in the nightmare of his death. “We’re not angry any more – the anger wasn’t taking us anywhere,” says Chris Head. “But there is despair when you read about other cases that no progress is being made in this area. Nobody has focused on the victims. It’s devastating – more so when you know there’s no justice.”
Campaigners believe the problems in relation to road-crash deaths are systemic; that investigations are less thorough, that there is a lack of transparency about charging decisions, that victims are poorly treated and sentences unduly lax, particularly with regard to driving bans.
Feminist campaigners use the term “victim blaming” to describe the process whereby responsibility for sexual offences is shifted away from perpetrators, particularly in rape trials. In recent years, some transport campaigners have begun using the same term, and have successfully moved safety for cyclists up the agenda. A report last month on the investigation and prosecution of road crash deaths was the result of this heightened awareness, says a spokesperson for the attorney general, Jeremy Wright. The report criticised the CPS for poor communication with families and called for new training for specialist prosecutors. The government is also looking at plans to extend the right for people to appeal against sentences viewed as too lenient to include drivers who have killed.
But if blaming women for sex crimes is symptomatic of sexism, how should we understand the blaming of road-traffic victims? Could it be that, unlike in trials of people accused of using guns or knives, many of us (juries, judges, police officers, journalists) find it all too easy to imagine being the defendants in such cases? Do we secretly sympathise with the driver who ran a red light, drove too fast or sent a text at the wheel? Is the consequence that we do not feel or think enough about the victims of these crimes?
The day after our interview, Kerry Dean emailed me. “I do not believe a driver is not guilty if he says he did not see a pedestrian if that person is hit by the front of the car,” she wrote. “When you drive, should you not be looking in the direction you are going?”
A pathologist told Kerry Dean her son probably never regained consciousness after being knocked down. He could have curled his hand up to his face as a kind of reflex, even though he was unconscious. It provides some solace to his mother, to think that Sean never knew he had been left to die alone in the dark at the side of the road.
• This article was amended on 9 March 2015 to correct the county in the opening paragraph.
user
The text passage is a news article that discusses the case of Sean Morley, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident, and the subsequent legal proceedings. It also highlights the broader issues surrounding road traffic accidents, the treatment of victims, and the perceived leniency in the justice system.

TYPE: NO_QUESTION

The passage does not contain any mathematical questions or calculations. It is primarily focused on the narrative of Sean Morley's death and the broader issues related to road traffic accidents and the justice system.