#177 Atherton Drink Driving

Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at Atherton 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 Atherton Magistrates Court. It's about a one hour drive, inland of Cairns. So I fly up to Cairns last night, drove up to Atherton this morning. Client was charged with repeat drink driving. This was his second in the last five years. So today it was a reading of 0.100, so that's mid range. So low range is 0.050 to 0.099. Mid range is 0.100 to 0.149. The penalties increase as your reading goes up. It was his second in five. Last time it was a reading 0.104, so a similar reading and there was another one outside of the last five years, 0.139. So third DUI, all mid range, so penalty rise. If it's your second mid range in five years, it's the worst case of an 18 months of disqualification [inaudible] minimum three months. If it's your first offence though, it's maximum nine months. It's still a minimum three months.

So strangely second mid in five years is a mandatory minimum three months as does a first mid in any timeframe. So yeah, today he was facing maximum 18 months, minimum three. That third, even though it was outside the last five years, it wasn't too far out of it. So even though there's man trees, minimums and maximums, the magistrate's got to look at a traffic history. If there's three drink drivings in basically six years, they're going to think, "Come on. When are you going to learn?"

He couldn't get a work licence because to get a work licence, you can't have lost your licence for any other reason in the last five years. And as I said, he's already lost it before in the last five years for his second mid range drink driving. So today was all about getting the disqualification as long as possible, as opposed to keeping you on the road immediately, because it was never going to happen. And also when you repeat drink driving in a pretty tight timeframe, magistrate start thinking about handing down penalties beyond disqualification and fines to probation or imprisonment of some form. So while he wasn't at a massive risk to give imprisonment, I still needed to be ready to go. If the magistrate with all the prosecutors started going in that direction.

Preparing got him to do the reformatory course we get all of their clients to do. Got him to get references based on template. We will give all of our clients, we get our clients to fill out an online form that gives us the information we need to prepare our submissions. So once we get that, the police brief we've effectively got everything we need to do our job preparation wise. So submissions were prepared in advance, met the client at court this morning, we grabbed they had a conference rooms at Atherton, but like a bit of bench space that we went through, what was going to happen. So procedure, what the prosecutors likely to say, what I will say, what the magistrates likely to say. Obviously I can't predict the future, but you do this enough times, day in, day out for over a decade. You know, there're patterns that form and I, the second nature to me, but the client, even if they've been in court once or twice before is pretty much naive to it.

So I like to make sure the client knows exactly what's going to happen before it happens rather than as it's happening. You know it's one or less things for the client to worry about. They've got enough on their plate without me making it some kind of guessing game. Anyway so I did all that, ran through it all with him. It was a busy court Atherton, and they do like other matters prior to the traffic and criminal offending. So there was a bit of a wait. But once we got in there pretty quick into it. Guided the magistrate through the good points about my client and they've done the course. Everything the referees say about him, him as a person, you know that he works and I'm not going to go into details about what he does for a living, but he works in an industry that provides care to people. So obviously if you don't care about people, you're not going to involve yourself in such profession.

So I spoke not at length but in detail, as succinctly as I could in the timeframe about my client as a person and the underlying issues that keep making this happen, but also the steps that he's taking to try and make sure that don't happen again. But anyway, I'm sort of prattling on little bit now. I was ultimately able sway the magistrate to not go past four months. So four to disqualification, a modest fine.

As I said, worst case was 18 months. Minimum was three, considering this is his third mid range. Four months is a very good outcome and the client agrees. Again, very happy client, I am Andrew Wiseman at Atherton Magistrates Court. Thanks for watching.