Two horror stories would be less alarming if' unique
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• I have a mixed bag again this month. It is the New Year and the postal service is suffering its usual agonies. Still, I have had the occasional Christmas card, so at least I am not entirely forgotten.
Nevertheless, I will relate two horror stories. They would be less alarming if I felt they were unique: unhappily, I believe that they are just examples of a fairly typical attitude in many magistrates courts.
In the first case my client appeared to answer a charge that he had exceeded the speed limit. The speed was not particularly high and, more important, his licence was clean, so there could be no suggestion that he was trying "anything' to avoid disqualification. He was, as he had been from the moment he was stopped, insistent that he had not been doing the speed that was alleged.
The first police sergeant asked if he might use the HORT 1 to refresh his memory of the day's events. He had not, he said, made any other notes and was merely acting on the information provided by the officer who had operated the VASCAR. His evidence bore that out. He stopped the car, he said, as his colleague had advised him both as to the identity of the vehicle and the alleged speed.
The second officer, another sergeant, asked if he might refer to the notes which were, he said, contemporaneous with the incident. Shortly, he told the court that he had checked the speed of my client's vehicle by the use of his VASCAR equipment and passed the information on to his colleague.
At no time was my client offered the opportunity to check the speed displayed on the read-out of the machine.
I asked the officer if I could look at his "contemporaneous" notes. At first sight they appeared to be in order but, for whatever reason, I was not over-happy about them. 'Are these notes,' I asked, "in your handwriting...?" "No," came the reply. "Who wrote them?" 'My colleague," Think about it. The first officer said that he had no notes, save only the HORT 1 — for the uninitiated that is the small form that you get asking you to produce your licence, insurance, etc, to a police station; the second officer said that his notes were made at the time. In fact, the first officer did have, and had made, the contemporaneous notes but, presumably, if he had told the court the truth, then the second officer would have had no record of the events.
This meant that not only had two senior police officers deliberately perjured themselves, but also that there was simply no corroboration of the suggestion that my client had exceeded the speed limit. Indeed, as I said to the court, the prosecution could have been brought just as persuasively if there had been no VASCAR equipment in the police car. To this day we do not know if the VASCAR was operated either properly or at all.
The court convicted my client, who was fined £42.
The second case is the story of the driver who was carrying a load on his artic that had a slight, but not illegal, overhang. The load was roped and sheeted, and each of the constituent parts of the load were wired together.
Two police officers stopped the vehicle. One held an HGV licence but had never loaded a vehicle; the other neither held an HGV licence nor had he ever loaded a vehicle.
They explained that the load was loosely wired and inadequately fastened and was, they said, likely to cause danger to the public by reason of its falling off. They produced the Code of Practice on Safety of Loads and said that the code required that the restraint should be, in a rearwards direction, equivalent to half the weight of the load.
It appeared that "loose" was a word that meant to these officers something that would not be apparent to ourselves. The wire did not move while the vehicle was being observed. The officers could not move it, or at least they did not try, and they could not say how many wire bands had been applied down the load.
Questioned about the formula set out in the Code, they were unable to say how heavy the load was, how heavy the tarpaulin was, and how strong and of what type were the ropes that were used, They did consider, however, that the ropes were tight. The load had travelled at least 80 miles and had something over 200 to go. They did not require the driver to make any adjustment of any sort; they simply let this 'dangerous" load go on its way. You will not be surprised to hear that the driver told the court that he had reached his destination without trouble; that he had carried similiar loads without any difficulty; and that at no time previously had there been any suggestion that this method of securing this load was unsatisfactory. The driver was fined £500, and the company £400, for using a vehicle with an insecure load.
I defy anyone to explain that decision other than by reference to the fact that the evidence of the two officers was "preferred," notwithstanding the evidence of fact and the inexperience of the two officers concerned.
As I found myself saying to the court in one of those cases, if you convict you are in fact saying that if! wear a blue suit with silver buttons I am a better person and certainly more truthful, I have always, I hope, acknowledged the need to control those who use our roads. Only a fool would deny that any vehicle can be a public danger and that, broadly speaking, the bigger the vehicle the bigger the danger. Only a fool, in my view at least, would believe that it is better to control those who use the roads rather than to uphold the rule of law. One of the frustrations about my work is the knowledge that the magistrates who reach these incredible decisions will never be in the position of the driver. I would give a great deal to listen to any of the magistrates in either of these two cases put in the position of the defendants and being faced with a court similar to their own.
Can no one see how serious all this is?
• by Jonathan Lawton