Serious offender jailed

Every week, killer drivers breeze out of court, often getting off with a fine and a short driving ban.

Now here’s the case of someone who did something much, much worse. He briefly nicked a footballer's Ferrari. He didn’t use violence. He didn’t cause any damage. He abandoned the car soon after nicking it.

A joyrider who took a Premier League footballer's £150,000 Ferrari as the player paid for fuel at a service station was jailed today.

Middlesbrough midfielder Gary O'Neil is understood to have left his keys in the ignition of his 200mph black Ferrari F430 Spider F1 after he filled it up at a garage on Ripon Road, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, yesterday morning.

Phillip Andrew McNamara, 28, from Hull, was arrested shortly after and appeared at Harrogate Magistrates Court today. McNamara admitted aggravated vehicle taking and was jailed for 10 weeks.

The British judicial system frequently treats the killing of cyclists and pedestrians as a fairly trivial offence which often merits a small fine. Whereas stealing a car or damaging a motor vehicle is taken very, very seriously indeed, and merits severe punishment. Let’s not forget the case of the cyclist who flipped, maliciously punctured 1,728 tyres, and was jailed for 16 months.

Naturally in a car supremacist society no one is asking why it is that the police are not raiding everyone involved in the manufacture and distribution of a deadly weapon expressly designed to encourage reckless and excessive speeding. Some lethal addictions are perfectly acceptable and speed is one of them. And detaching an addict from his drug can, after all, cause exceptional hardship.