#169 St George Drink Driving

Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at St George Magistrates Court as he represents a client charged with Drink Driving. Watch Andrew explain what happened in the courtroom, along with the outcome which he achieved and how he achieved it.

All right. Today I'm at St George Magistrates Court. It's about a six hour drive west of Brisbane. I drove up yesterday, left Brisbane... I had a job in Brisbane city yesterday morning, finished that at about 10:00 and just hit the road. Got here about 4:00. So, yeah. I think it's probably closer to 7:00. Anyway, whatever it is, it's quite a long drive from Brisbane. It's about two hours south of Roma if that gives you some perspective, or hour and a half or so north of Goondiwindi.

Look, client was charged with repeat drink driving. This time it was a reading of .079, but he had a previous in the last five years, back when he was a P plater he got done .026. So when you're on your Ps, you're supposed to be zero, so .026 as a P plater put him over. On his open licence this time round, but again, second in five years.

So a couple of things. If you're low range and it's your second offence in five years, the mandatory penalties go up. So for a first offence of .079, which is low range, it'd be a disqualification period of one to nine months. But if it's your second in five, that bumps up, for a low range reading, to three to 18 months. So what, as a first offence, would've been one to nine months turns into three to 18.

You can't get a work licence if you previously lost your licence in the last five years. So had this have been a first offence and he hadn't lost his licence in the last five years and he satisfied certain other prerequisites, we could have applied for a work licence, but given he previously lost his licence in the last five years, that was off the table. He was facing a penalty range of three to 18 months, absolute best case of three months. And obviously it was my job to try and convince the magistrate to not go too far past the minimum three months.

We got him to do everything that we get all of our clients to do. That online reformatory course we get everyone to do, he did that. We gave him a character reference template to give to all of his referees who base their references on that. I mean, we don't spell out what we want people to say, but obviously you've got to know who to address it to. If it's not addressed to the court and it just says to whom it may concern, they're just going to ignore it. And you need to state that, or the referee needs to state, that they know what you've done and that it's being used for court. If it doesn't say all of that, the court will just ignore it. Anyway, he got those references.

As I said, I drove up yesterday, stayed here last night, met the client this morning. There's no conference room at St George Courthouse, so we just grabbed a bit of shade under a tree. And I ran through my submissions, the procedure, what he can expect me to say, what do you expect the prosecutor to say, and the magistrate, the formalities. We went in there. There was quite a, I don't know if heat is the right word, but there was a bit of argy bargy between myself, the prosecutor, and the magistrate, because the prosecutor was seeking a different penalty to what I was after, and obviously if there's too much resistance, blood gets flowing. I mean, it was all civil. I'm not implying that there was anything hostile going on, but it wasn't a run-of-the-mill, stand-there-and-speak type of thing, which you may expect might be the case with stuff that isn't your murders and your bank robberies and whatnot.

But anyway, what I'm getting at is I was pushing for a penalty that was quite a bit more lenient than what everyone thought was appropriate. In any event, though, I was ultimately able to persuade the magistrate to not go past the minimum three months, largely due to everything he did between the intercept and today. So everything we told him to do, the course, getting the references, but also what he does for a living. I'm not going to say what he does, but let's just say it was a driver's licence dependent role. Where he lives. I mean, if you're unemployed in this part of the world, life's tough.

Anyway, I'm sort of prattling on now. Magistrate, as I said, gave the minimum three months. She decided not to fine him and basically did what's called convicted not further punish, given that he's likely to be out of work for some time. So it was simply a three month disqualification, no fine. Client's obviously relieved, thankful it wasn't seven, eight, nine, 10 or higher.

I'm Andrew Weisman at St George Magistrates Court. Thanks for watching.