News / Fines for speeding and careless driving
A YOUNG Shetland fish worker was fined £335 when he appeared before Lerwick Sheriff Court on Monday admitting driving at 94mph in a 60mph limit.
Police clocked Grant Gillie, of Haldane Burgess Crescent, Lerwick on the A970 main road at Fladdabister, on the evening of 8 August.
The court accepted that the 21-year-old was not of the “boy racer fraternity” but had simply “succumbed to the temptation” to speed on a straight length of road.
Sheriff Valerie Johnston also gave him six penalty points.
In other motoring offences dealt with by the court another young man was fined £165 for speeding on the same stretch of road a few days later.
Michael Josef Hogan, formerly of Parkhead, Sandwick, pled guilty by letter to driving at a speed of 87mph on 11 August. The 23-year-old’s licence was endorsed with six penalty points.
Meanwhile, sentence was deferred on Raymond Tulloch, of New Hall, Bressay, who admitted driving carelessly on the A970 at the Lang Kames and failing to report an accident, on 16 July.
The court heard that Tulloch had been driving at high speed at the Kames, failed to negotiate a bend and lost control of his car which came to rest on its roof, down an embankment.
The 51-year-old managed to crawl from the vehicle unhurt but declined any assistance from a witness to the accident.
When somebody he knew came, Tulloch left the scene of the accident before the police arrived. It took officers until the following day to trace Tulloch.
Pleading for leniency, defence solicitor Tommy Allan said his client was in the process of obtaining employment with a local construction firm, for which a driving licence was essential.
Sheriff Valerie Johnston deferred sentence until 17 October to hear whether Tulloch was successful in getting that job.
Finally, Aith resident David Smith was fined £165 for driving carelessly and crashing into two vehicles at Holmsgarth Road, in Lerwick, on 6 July this year.
Seventy-seven-year-old Smith, of Braewick, “didn’t have his wits about him” when he drove into stationary traffic ahead of him.
Defence solicitor Tommy Allan told the court that his client “didn’t brake at all”.
He was admonished for driving without a licence after the court heard that he had not realised he had to renew his driving licence at the age of 70.
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