A PERSONAL VIEW BY ECHO COLUMNIST JIM WORSDALE:

I KNOW Aloke Basu, the GP awaiting sentencing for causing death by dangerous driving over the killing of an elderly pedestrian in Southend last year.

I know he was foolish to be behind the wheel of a car when he suffered from eye problems, foolish almost beyond belief.

I know the family of the victim of so dreadful a tragedy can never forget their loss, nor understand how a doctor could become a killer.

So I know, also, there will be Controversy over the news in this paper of hundreds signing a petition seeking mercy for Dr Basu, pleading for leniency.

And yet, because I know this GP – not well, but sufficiently to know how caring and concerned he has been to patients galore through many years of service at Shoebury Health Centre – I understand the petition and its plea.

And, controversial and divisive though this issue is, I feel Dr Basu has already been punished severely. More than a year has passed since the tragedy which robbed a family of a loved one. Robbed patients of a doctor they depended on. Robbed a now-guilty man of an unblemished reputation and removed him from driving on our roads.

He and his wife, who have no children, have largely hidden from friends and neighbours through the long months of the slowly-turning legal wheels, wracked by remorse and regret.

Dr Basu took an elderly woman’s life when, for much of his career, he was concerned to improve or save lives galore. In a few foolish moments, in the winter of early last year, life as he and his wife and his friends and patients knew it, was also over.

Of course, a judge must decree whether something such as probation or community service, as well as a life-long driving ban, is appropriate, these many months since the tragedy. Or they must decide whether society demands a man formerly held in such high public regard goes to jail and a wife is robbed of her husband, as a family was robbed of its mother in one dreadful moment in time.

Petitioners feel there are grounds for leniency. Soon we shall learn the court’s decision.

Whatever the outcome, this sad story is one of loss in so many tragic ways.