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Banned for a single Contact: 01733 261456. 34) April-21 May
Page 14
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error after 38 years
• by Dominic Perry An HGV driver with a spotless 38-year record has been banned from driving for a year and fined £750 after a poorly secured stabiliser leg on his truck hit a cyclist.
Driver Dennis Morgan believes that the sentence is harsh and is the result of fallout from an earlier case where a driver was jailed for three years after a schoolboy was killed in a similar accident just 20 miles away.
Morgan, who worked for Portsmouth firm Contract Lifting Services, says that he is now out of a job following the case at Portsmouth Crown Court. A jury found him guilty of dangerous driving, although he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of careless driving.
He claims that he did everything in his power to secure the leg, although he acknowledges that he might not have pressed the retaining pin fully home. He says: "I've always been a stickler for checking and double checking; I even gat stick off the other lads for it. But I'm absolutely gutted by this; I'm like a fish out of water now they've taken my livelihood away from me."
The cyclist received only minor injuries in the accident, which Morgan says happened at low speed and after 15 miles of drying. He adds: "If that leg was so dangerous then it would have come out beforehand."
Morgan's boss at Contract Lifting Services, Kenneth Watherstone, defends his former driver: "He's got an exemplary driving record and now they have taken away his most important possession."