By Kath Gannaway
A WESBURN man will spend a year in prison and do two years’ community work for his role in a 2014 incident in which two teenage girls were seriously injured.
James Brian Lennon was sentenced on Tuesday 16 August, in the County Court at Melbourne by Judge Hampel having pleaded guilty to two charges of Dangerous Driving Causing Injury and one charge of Reckless Conduct Endangering Person.
Lennon, now 22, was 19 and had had his probationary licence for less than nine months, when he drove a high-powered Landcruiser ute over rough terrain resulting in Ebony Dawson and Tarryn Rankin being thrown from the tray of a high-powered Landcruiser as it bumped and drifted around a bend.
The court heard in a plea hearing on Monday 9 August that Lennon had gone on a camping trip with friends for the Labour Day long weekend to an isolated rural property on Woods Point Road at St Clair.
Around 7pm on Saturday 14 March, some of the group, in utes and on motor bike, decided to drive about 800 metres to a higher point on the property to get mobile phone reception.
As Lennon, who admitted to having been drinking for around two hours, drove from a four-wheel-drive track on to a dirt road, the vehicle started bouncing around, sending the girls sliding along the tray. A third person, Mark McLaren, had been able to hold on to the back rail.
The prosecution lawyer quoted witness statements telling of the desperate attempts by the girls to hold on to each other, describing how as Ebony began to slide, Tarryn had let go of her safety grip on McLaren in a vain attempt to stop her friend from falling off.
Judge Hampel said there were a number of factors to be taken into account in imposing a combination prison and community order sentence.
She said Lennon knew he was not permitted to drive the V8 turbo-charged ute other than for work purposes, that he knew there the three people were on the back and that there were no side panels.
She said that Lennon’s estimated blood alcohol content at the time of the incident was closer to 0.82, than the 0.60 recorded three hours later.
“Witnesses estimated your speed at between 50 and 60km/h,” she said.
Recapping on the witness reports of the vehicle sliding and bumping, and of pot holes in the road, she said, “You were going too fast for the conditions.”
“It is not suggested you intended the victims to come to any harm; your driving involved creating a real risk that anyone on the tray would be killed or seriously injured and in the case of Miss Dawson and Miss Rankin, they were indeed seriously injured,” she said.
“It has been asserted you were unaware until you were told they had fallen off, but there is a considerable body of evidence that points to your awareness of people on back before you took off, while you were driving and before they fell.
“This is not a case where the dangerous driving arises merely from failure to check rear vision mirrors,” she said.
The families of both James Lennon and of Ebony Dawson were in the court for the plea and for the sentencing.
Miss Dawson was in an induced coma for a number of weeks and sustained an acquired brain injury that medical reports indicated she was likely to always require some supervision and support with even basic tasks.
Ebony’s mother and step-father, in victim impact statements, told of the heart-ache for them and for her three sisters, as a result not only of the physical changes but of personality changes in Ebony.
“Ebony was my friend and my daughter and at times my confidant,” she said. “I have lost all of that.”
She said in pleading guilty Lennon had accepted responsibility and spared others giving evidence in a trial, but said she remained concerned at what seemed to be a level of minimising his responsibility for what happened.
Addressing reports of incidents where Lennon had been ostracised by friends and the community, she said while that was difficult, it was not an extra punishment to be taken into account.
“It is a reflection of what’s seen to be a community response to driving in this manner,” she said.
She said Lennon had no previous criminal convictions and had good prospects of rehabilitation but that having regard to the nature of his driving, the number of victims and the seriousness of the injuries to Ebony in particular, a combination of imprisonment and community service, was appropriate.
