Bridget Curtis pressed down on the accelerator of her automatic BMW 520d car after stopping outside Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, causing it to mount a kerb
A driver who struck and killed an eight-month-old baby in her pram outside a hospital has had her prison sentence reduced.
Judges at the Court of Appeal described Bridget Curtis’ case as “truly tragic” after hearing the woman, who was 69 at the time and is now 71, had a “lapse of concentration,” which caused her to press down on the accelerator of her automatic BMW 520d car after stopping.
The vehicle mounted a kerb by Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, and collided into the pushchair of Mabli Cariad Hall. Mabli, who had just said a final goodbye to her paternal grandmother Betty Hall, who was receiving end-of-life care at the hospital, sustained fatal head injuries and died days later.
Curtis pleaded guilty to causing death by dangerous driving last September and was jailed for four years at Swansea Crown Court in January. Her guilty plea was despite giving “no comment” interviews to police initially, something Mabil’s dad Rob Hall called “disgusting”.
But now three senior judges have reduced Curtis’ sentence to three years, after the woman’s barrister described the initial punishment as “manifestly excessive”. Sitting at Court of Appeal on Tuesday, the judges cut the jail term but also increased Curtis’ disqualification from driving from six years to seven-and-a-half years.
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Mr Justice Butcher, sitting with Lord Justice Bean and Judge Richard Marks KC, said: “We say at once that this is a truly tragic case. We have read the very moving victim personal statements of Mabli’s parents, expressing their grief at the death of their beloved baby. No one could fail to sympathise with them for the appalling loss that they have sustained.”
Curtis, who attended the appeal via video link from HMP Eastwood Park in Gloucestershire and sat in a wheelchair throughout, had no previous convictions at the time of the incident and had held a clean driving licence for more than 50 years.
Her sentencing hearing at Swansea Crown Court heard that on the day of the collision, she had driven her daughter to an outpatient appointment at the hospital.
When her daughter struggled to find her handbag in the rear of the car, Curtis unlocked the door and turned around to assist her. But as she did so, she pressed down on the accelerator of her car, which had been left running and was not in park mode.
The car reached speeds of more than 29mph and travelled 28 metres in around four seconds, mounting the kerb of a grass seating area and causing Mabli to be thrown out of her pushchair.
The car only stopped when it collided with a tree, having also caused injuries to Mabli’s father Rob Hall. Mabli, the youngest of six siblings, received treatment at the Withybush Hospital, as well as hospitals in Cardiff and Bristol, dying in the arms of her parents on June 25.
Her mother, Gwen Hall, told the sentencing hearing that her daughter was “so bright, so beautiful, so full of love and life”. She said: “She hadn’t crawled yet. She had said ‘Mama’ for the first time only the day before. We had so much planned with her. It was nowhere near the time for her to be taken away from us. She was my baby. My eight-month-old baby.”
John Dye, for Curtis, told Swansea Crown Court that she was a mother-of-four and grandmother of 10, who was “absolutely devastated” by the incident.
Appearing again for Curtis at the Court of Appeal on Tuesday, Mr Dye said: “This is a tragic case, but the issue really was one of pedal confusion.”
He continued: “Objectively, this is clearly dangerous driving, but in terms of culpability, these four seconds of driving were more akin to, maybe not a momentary lapse, but a lapse of concentration.”
Craig Jones, for the Crown Prosecution Service, made no oral submissions to the court. Reducing the sentence, Mr Justice Butcher said: “True it is that the appellant did not intend to cause any harm, and true also that the mistake was of a short duration, but the driving was well over the threshold of dangerousness.”
He continued that Curtis would have known that she had stopped “in a busy area outside a hospital with potentially very vulnerable pedestrians around”, and that four or five seconds “is far from being a negligible duration”.
He added that the court accepted that Curtis’s remorse was “genuine”, stating: “It was inattention and confusion as to which pedal she was pressing that caused this tragedy.”