Don't judge this man too harshly

Gary Hart's main error, as his car drifted into the Great Heck train disaster, in which 10 people died, was not to have ensured he was the director of Railtrack or a train-operating company. We've not seen any of these in court, facing charges of causing death at Paddington or Hatfield. And, if they were and were found guilty, do you think the judge would warn them that they faced substantial terms of imprisonment? Answers, please, on the back of a postage stamp.

Hart was, of course, stupid - and as it turned out, catastrophically stupid. But there is, just as obviously, no sense in which he intended or could foresee the outcome of his stupidity. Where does his crime lie on a graph which might also include the cases of drunken drivers who mow down senior citizens on pedestrian crossings and get off with a fine or community service? The graph could also include verdicts and sentences like those delivered last week at Hull Crown Court on the thuggish Leeds United players and their friends, where celebrity appears to have been regarded as an argument in mitigation: a shameful episode in the history of the English judicial system.

In the minds of Gary Hart's jury, and of the judge who's now expected to deliver sentence in January, is he paying, by default, for the recent catalogue of other rail horrors which have gone unpunished by law? Is he, in a word, a scapegoat?

The Health and Safety Executive's initial report said that the disaster at Great Heck, near Selby, was a "wholly exceptional" accident. It was due not only to Hart's lack of sleep, but also to a cruel combination of coincidences. In the first impact, the GNER Newcastle-to-King's Cross passenger train hit Hart's Land Rover at 117mph. This might have led only to painful injuries if, after careering along upright off the track, the passenger train hadn't met, head on, a freight train coming the other way, at 47mph, laden with a thousand tons of imported coal. Chaos and carnage ensued.

No one could watch the grieving widows who appeared on BBC1's special documentary last Thursday evening without deep sympathy for their plight, and deep admiration for how they, at least, were trying to remake their lives. I'm not making Clintonlike remarks about "sharing their pain". Their pain was their own; and this, and memories, were all they were left with. The young son of the Freightliner co-driver, killed in the crash, said that he now looks away if he ever sees a goods train.

It was a terrible event. That's one verdict nothing should, or can, diminish. But in even the most dreadful circumstances, the punishment - and the opprobrium - must fit the crime.

Hart lied about falling asleep. But who of us, in such appalling circumstances, wouldn't have tried to defend ourselves? He also comes across as what, in my native West Riding, we used to call "brussen" - in other words, overbearingly selfconfident. His boast to the police that "my life is 1,000mph; it's just the way I live" couldn't have been worse phrased. At Great Heck, 164mph, the cumulative-speed of the colliding trains, was quite enough to crush bodies and mangle limbs. Hart's talk of being essentially a "hunter-gatherer" - remember he's a former archery champion - was the battiest kind of pseudo-survivalist lingo.

This way of talking is more suited to an internet chatroom or a saloon bar than to a Crown Court (though, to be fair, one of Hart's boasts was that he lived not only without much sleep, but also without drink or drugs). This personal shortcoming no doubt told against him when the jury at Leeds last week considered their verdict on the charge of dangerous driving. To be on a jury is to judge character (not, of course, celebrity), at least as much as the concrete evidence presented by the warring lawyers. Hart failed that test.

None the less, what does this mean he deserves? Comment after the event has been dominated by items about the perils of driver fatigue. Professor Jim Horne, and his Sleep Research Laboratory at Loughborough University, have been endlessly quoted. Tiredness is estimated to play "a significant part" in up to 25 per cent of accidents on motorways and fast roads, causing the death of perhaps one person a day in Britain. The worst times for fatigue are, not surprisingly, midnight-to 6am (with the last two hours being the most lethal). The RAC carried out research last year, in which 60 per cent of drivers admitted they had driven while feeling sleepy and eight per cent said they had momentarily nodded off at some time.

I suspect that the true proportions are much higher. Who hasn't come off a plane journey into a hired car, feeling groggy? Or driven off a Channel ferry at some Godforsaken hour in the morning, after a fitful night's sleep? How many lorry or van drivers haven't felt pressured to get the delivery done, regardless? This risk is made worse by the current commercial passion for holding all inventory goods at stores miles away, in great sheds at motorway intersections, so that they can be delivered "just in time". I, too, have once or twice nodded off; yet no one who knows me would think of me as any kind of lunatic driver.

In an ideal moral world, Hart should have pleaded guilty and apologised. But, for all his faults, I could not but feel, "There but for the grace of God ..."

The catastrophe at Great Heck may yet prove to be some kind of ethical turning point. I hope it will. The clear analogy is with drink-driving. Not all that long ago, especially among young men, this was just one of the things you did. Gradually, a moral ratchet has striven, with some success, to raise it from the status of daredevilry to misdemeanour, and from misdemeanour to social evil.

To begin a similar process of public education and propaganda with fatigue-driving is more important than to crucify foolish, heedless Gary Hart. We shouldn't heap up the blame for a very widespread social failing on one individual's shoulders.

Justice, yes; but also mercy.

? Paul Barker is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Community Studies.