KNOW YOUR RIGHTS
Patterson Law sends our best wishes to PHTM readers and we hope you have an enjoyable Christ- mas. However we urge all professional drivers not to abandon your responsibilities and put your licences at risk. Below are three examples where people did just that (some details have been changed.)
If you need any advice on motoring matters, please email
advice@pattersonlaw.co.uk or call 01626 359800 for free legal advice.
CASE 1
Question: On Christmas Eve I was driving along the road. As I came off a roundabout and entered the slip road, I noticed traffic was at a complete standstill. I was sat there for 15 minutes and traffic wasn’t moving at all. It came over the radio that there had been an accident and the road was shut. Usually I would have just waited but as it was Christmas Eve I wanted to get home, so I did a U-turn and came back up the slip road and onto the roundabout.
Annoyingly there was a police car just about to come onto the slip road as I was coming off it, and he pulled me over. He said he was on his way to the accident ahead and I could have caused another. He said he would charge me with dangerous driving and summons me to court. What can I do now?
Answer: You’ll be sent a court Summons through the post with a hearing date to attend your local Magistrates’ Court. Based on what the officer has said, you’ll likely be charged with dangerous driving.
You will need to think about what plea you enter. Dangerous driving is a serious offence, carrying a minimum 12-month ban with an extended retest and community orders/custody in serious cases.
If you plead guilty you will definitely be banned, but by pleading early we maintain full credit and have a better chance of keeping it to the minimum 12 months, and if we’re lucky, avoiding community orders as well.
Or you plead not guilty. Here we are arguing that you are not guilty of dangerous driving – but considering you did drive the wrong way down a slip road, I think it’s very sensible to indicate a plea to ‘careless driving’ instead. Careless (or driving without due care and attention) is the lesser offence, and carries 3-9 points and a fine, but no community orders and only a ban in the most serious of cases.
68
So we wouldn’t be arguing there was nothing wrong with the standard of your driving, but that your driving was only careless rather than dangerous. A bad judgement rather than deliberately bad driving. Our focus would be that you only drove a short distance down the slip road, that there was nobody coming in the opposite direction and that traffic was standstill. Hopefully we can get the court to agree.
If they do agree then of course the benefits are obvious, but the risk is that if we lose we are going to lose credit in sentence, meaning you could receive a longer ban, higher fines/costs and you have a greater chance of getting a community order.
Outcome:We didn’t actually have to plead not guilty in the end, as the prosecutor at the first hearing agreed with us that the driving only amounted to careless driving, and agreed to amend the charge.
We entered a guilty plea to that charge and the driver was given 6 points. But the District Judge made it clear that the outcome could have been very different had anyone else been driving up the slip road, or had he driven more than 30/40 yards.
CASE 2
Question: I’ve been done for drink driving and have court next week. I was at my Christmas party, had about 5 or 6 pints and a couple of shots. I stupidly drove back to my mate’s house and someone reported me. Got back to my mates and carried on drinking. Police arrived about 30 minutes later and arrested me for drink driving. I blew 78 at the police station.
I’m going to plead guilty as I know I was drink driving but I’m looking for advice because I was drinking at my mate’s so I think I should get a lesser punishment, if that makes sense? Hoping you can help.
Answer: Sentencing for drink driving works in brackets. The legal limit is 35ug of alcohol per 100ml of breath. If you blow 36-59 you get a ban of 12-16 months. If you blow 60-89, it’s a ban of 17-22 months. So we need to see if we can get you into the lower bracket, rather than the second.
I suggest initially we instruct an expert toxicologist to work out what your reading would have been at the time of driving, discounting the alcohol you drank at your mate’s house after you stopped. We will need to confirm your height, weight, sex, exactly what you had to eat and when, exactly what you
DECEMBER 2024 PHTM
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