Auriol Gray case

Is anyone able to help explain this sentence? I’ve read several reports but I still don’t really understand it. It’s a horrible incident and despite visual impairment she shouldn’t have acted the way she did, but also couldn’t the cyclist have just stopped rather than cycling off the pavement without looking?

Mixed paths are a nightmare for many people with disabilities. I feel like this should be used as a driving force to create safe segregated footpaths and cycleways rather than imprison a vulnerable woman.

@carrion or any other legally minded people?

Fully accept that I may be missing legal and/or ethical considerations. Just think it’s a really horrible case all round, but one with interesting (and potentially concerning) implications.

I need to refresh my memory of the case, but I think I was of the opinion that the pusher was definitely at fault, but putting her in prison serves no purpose whatsoever

Meanwhile, this guy got 2 years and a 3 year driving ban (3 years!!!) :confounded: For this:

CW: THE VIDEO IS HORRIBLE, STUFF OF NIGHTMARES

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For everyone!

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I don’t have a massive amount of sympathy for her because of her actions, but yeah the consequences should be things like “not having a dual one-way ringroad around a small town”, and “providing adequate space for cyclists and non-car road users”, rather than going to prison.

Shared spaces are just a copout for people who CBA to do anything actually helpful.

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It seems a bit weird to me too. It looks like the cyclist lost her balance but to me it looks like that could have happened whether the pedestrian said “get off the pavement” or “excuse me, what’s the time?”. I don’t think the gestures were particularly threatening. Just looks like a cyclist who encountered an interruption while cycling and fell.

I thought the same. An OTT reaction from her, probably based on existing annoyance rather than the individual cyclist’s actions, I was expecting way more of a push or something. It’s an awful story, and the fact she left the scene reflects badly on her. But I think it’s a tragically unlucky story rather than anything malicious, a jail sentence seems incredibly extreme.

(Also found it grimly ironic that while the reporter was doing her reconstruction in the video on the BBC website someone on a bike wizzed past her at a close distance)

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She didn’t push or make contact, it was gesturing/ swearing.

Didn’t clock that she left the scene. That is definitely a significant factor, although probably mitigated to an extent (not suggesting fully) by her subsequent autism diagnosis.

Yeah, it’s really easy to see how Grey genuinely believed it to be pedestrian only (lack of signage to indicate otherwise) and Ward genuinely believed it to be mixed (long precedent of being used by cyclists) :slightly_frowning_face:

If you look carefully at the video and at her movements at the very moment the cyclist loses balance, i wouldn’t be so sure about that. To me it looks like she made contact. And it doesn’t take much contact at all for a cyclist to lose balance.
I read something a while back to the effect that if people were privy to the full details of the case that there would be very little sympathy towards the woman.

Two things

  • it’s easy to forget sometimes that juries etc see far more info than we see in the media
  • cyclists in general get the short end of the stick in terms of justice even when they’re killed. Kind of dismays me to see people suggesting that the cyclist somehow catastrophically lost her balance because of a minor gesture.
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Ah, that’s me being incapable of reading then :man_facepalming::man_facepalming:

Although having reread I don’t think it’s entirely clear. It says ‘collided’ but without being able to see it’s difficult to know exactly what that means. But yeah, I hadn’t realised there was contact at all, I thought it was just the arm movements / swearing.

Very sympathetic to cyclists in general and aware that they aren’t well protected by the justice system, but watching the video it does just look to me like two people closely approaching/bumping into each other and one falling, rather than a pedestrian shoving the cyclist into the road or leaping into her way and making her swerve unavoidably. I don’t know what other evidence there was obvs but in the cctv it doesn’t appear that the pedestrian does an awful lot.

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The really strange thing about this case (it was fairly local so on our news quiate a bit) was that apparently the police couldnt even work out whether where it happened was a mixed use path or not, which is pretty staggering. Surely it should be documented somewhere, so I think part of it hinges on that they couldnt establish whether the cyclist was in the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’

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Fair enough. I understand not everyone wants to study footage of the moment of someone’s death, but to me it’s really clear. Grey moves toward the bike, at which point the cyclist doesn’t just lose her balance; her directon completely changes - something that would happen even at low speed when someone grabs or pushes on your handlebars.

" Though the jury was told that Grey has cerebral palsy, Judge Enright said “these actions are not explained by disability.” He noted that Grey lied to authorities about what happened and gave “not a word about remorse until today,” BBC reported. "

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I did watch it several times and I don’t see her moving towards the bike. It looks to me like she was in the middle of the pavement the whole way through that clip, makes some shooing motions with her hand, turns towards the cyclist as she passes and at that point the cyclist appears to lose her balance and turns the wheel sharply to try to regain it. You can’t see for sure that she isn’t pushed but I don’t think the argument was that she actually pushed her, just that they made contact. It’s not clear to me that contact being made is much more the pedestrian’s fault than the cyclist’s.