#186 Mareeba Drink Driving

Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at Mareeba 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 Mareeba Magistrates Court. It's about a one hour drive, west of Cairns. So I flew up last night, stayed at Cairns and drove a hire car up this morning. A client was charged with low range drink driving, reading of .056, not the biggest crime in history, but the client was concerned enough to seek out my services. Penalty range is one to nine months, so maximum nine months, mandatory one month. Which, depending on what you do for a living, some people don't really have a need for a licence, so it's not the end of the world if they were to get a four month disqualification and they might not want a lawyer and they're happy with four months, but some people really, really want to make sure they get the minimum.

But this particular client, she's here on a tourist visa, and wants to extend that visa and potentially stay on and get a work visa at some point. So she was petrified about the recording of a conviction. So drink driving is not a criminal matter. You don't get a criminal conviction, but you ordinarily get a traffic conviction, but even traffic convictions can be problematic for some people when it comes to visas and you know, on balance, it may not have caused problems with her visa, but there's always a chance that it might, and she wanted to sort of do everything she could do, extinguish that threat for want of a better word. Again, to fly me all the way from Brisbane to Mareeba for a reading of .056 might seem a bit extreme. But as I said, this particular client was adamant that she wanted to snuff this mistake out in the best possible way she could and that's why I'm here.

She didn't need a work licence, but even if she did, she couldn't get one because she's got an international licence. You have to be the holder of an open Queensland licence when intercepted to be eligible to apply for a work licence. There's a number of other prerequisites, but you don't even get past the starting point if you don't have an open Queensland licence. So that was never an option or necessity for this client. As I said, given she's on a holiday, not being able to drive for a long period would be unfortunate. So I was here to get the disqualification down as low as I can, ideally one month. But most importantly to her was pushing for no conviction recorded. We got the client to complete the reformatory course we get all of our clients to do, got her to get character references based on the template we provide all of our clients.

So prepared by submissions, which were both written submissions, with regard to that I'm recording a conviction and my verbal submissions for today. I emailed my written submissions to the court last week, just to make sure the magistrate had opportunity, and the prosecutions, to read them in advance, if they saw fit or had the time. Excuse me. As I said, flew up to Cairns last night, stayed at Cairns, drove a hire car up this morning, met the client at court. We grabbed a conference room, ran through my submissions, the procedure, who stands where, what the prosecutor's going to say, what the magistrate may say, but procedurally, obviously, there's certain steps that are the same every time. And if you've never been to court before, it's reassuring for your lawyer to run you through them. Did that, went into the conference room, got in nice and early, which was nice.

Sometimes these regional courts, because they don't have court every day, you can be sort of waiting around forever. They'll do the DV matters, the children's matters, and it's not unusual in regional locations to be twiddling your thumbs until 11:00 AM. But the prosecutor kindly got us on nice and early this morning. So in and out, it's 9:41 AM as I'm making this video, so in and out, nice and quick. Long story short, I was successful and persuaded the magistrate to not go past the minimum one month disqualification. And I was also successful in persuading the magistrate to not record a conviction. So one month disqualification, modest fine, no conviction recorded, clients happy and very relieved. I'm Andrew Wiseman at Mareeba Magistrates Court. Thanks for watching.