And sentencing the 37-year-old cabbie, Judge Timothy Spencer raised concerns over how he was allowed to work on the streets of Nottingham - after he had been in trouble twice before for kerb-crawling, in 2011 and 2006.
After the hearing, a Nottingham City Council spokesman said his previous caution and conviction for kerb-crawling should have been spotted and an investigation had been launched.
The married defendant, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, picked up his victim in the city after a night out and raped her in the back seat of his private-hire car in Sneinton.
He faced two rape charges concerning the same incident, but the jury cleared him of the first allegation and convicted him on the second on Monday.
Azimi, of Chadwick Road, had denied both allegations, claiming the victim had sexually assaulted him.
Judge Spencer told Azimi, who had his head bowed in the dock, that he had brought depravation on his family and himself.
"On that night, on October 17, you were working as a taxi driver in this city," he said. "You were, in my judgement, preying on young women. One of whom was the victim.
"You, in my judgement, were a chancer. You spotted your chance. She filled at least some of your desires.
"In particular she was clearly in a state of disorientation through alcohol and you decided, in my judgement, that she was prey for your sexual desires. Somewhere in that journey you decided rather than take her home, as your duty and obligation was to do, you were going to stop and take advantage of her."
A manager at the company where Azimi worked had given a statement to the prosecution that said all drivers were checked by taxi licensing.
"As a business we don't get directly involved in those checks," it read. "We get updated on the results."
However, prosecutor Gordon Aspden told the judge it appeared those checks had not been carried out in this case.
Judge Spencer said: "I know not if he was checked by taxi licensing, whether he withheld his relevant conviction or caution from taxi licensing, or whether they checked independently against records that must have been available to them.
"That conviction and caution reveal a situation where this man was wholly unsuitable to be driving a taxi anywhere and certainly within this city. It seems to me if the authority did carry out any checks they need to look carefully at the system and go to independent records, which I assume are available to them by going to the police."
A City Council spokesman said: "This driver applied for a licence with us in 2008. His earlier caution and conviction undoubtedly should have been spotted in our background checks and acted on and we are very sorry that this didn't happen.
"If we were presented with the same situation today, our procedures have improved sufficiently for us to be confident that he would be identified as a person who was not fit and proper to be a taxi driver, and so not given a licence. Our priority is to protect the public.
"We now demand higher standards of drivers and if there is the slightest doubt about a person's suitability, we err on the side of caution and don't issue a licence. "We now carry out DBS checks every year rather than every three and our licensing team is now co-located with the police licensing team where intelligence sharing and closer working will allow issues like this to be identified and acted on."
No comments:
Post a Comment