#135 Brisbane Drink Driving

Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at Brisbane 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 Brisbane Magistrates Court. Client was charged with mid range drink driving, reading of 0.126. It was a single vehicle accident. Collided with a tree, wrote the vehicle off. as I said, 0.126. That's mid range. So the mid range bracket starts at 0.149. In Queensland, if you are the holder of a open Queensland licence, you haven't lost your licence in the last five years and your reading's either low or mid range, meaning under 0.15, you are eligible to apply for a DUI drink driving work licence.

Simple eligibility doesn't equate to success, particularly where there's a collision and a writing off of a vehicle, and where your reading's mid range. 0.126, but eligibility is there as a starting point. My client, because they were eligible, did instruct me to apply for a DUI drink driving work licence. So worst case scenario without a work licence is a 12 month disqualification, mandatory minimum's three months.

But when you apply for a work licence and if you're successful, the magistrates have got the power to double the disqualification, and nine times out of 10, they do that. Meaning that the worst case with the work licence becomes two years and the minimum bumps up to six months. So, as I said, my client was eligible, given that they hadn't lost their licence previously in the last five years and they were a holder of an open Queensland licence.

Basically with work licences, the application is, if you're not self-employed, I need a draught about an eight page affidavit talking about your income, expenses, family situation, what happened on the day in questions, steps you've taken to address the issues and et cetera. It's eight pages, but in a nutshell, that's what it is. But also if you're employed, I need to do about a four page affidavit up for your boss to sign saying that you will, or why you need your licence to either do your job or get into work to do it, and the fact that if you don't have a licence, you will lose your job.

Whether that's because you can't do your job or you simply just can't get there. If you're, self-employed, obviously there's no employer to sign an affidavit, but your affidavit, I need to go in a lot more detail. So I've got to embed your profit and loss and go into a lot more detail about the commercial difficulties you're going to suffer without a licence.

I draft all those affidavits well before court and provide them to both the prosecutions and the court in advance. I got my client to complete a reformatory course. So we get all of our clients to do, got her get references based on a template we provide. Obviously the fact that there was a collision and she'd written her car off aggravates the matter, so it was always going to be difficult to get it over the line.

So I had to, as I said, make sure the client did everything that I asked and to their credit, they did. But again, with regard to the affidavits, I had to address every aspect, what happened, why they in that moment felt it appropriate to drive, how the collision came about, the loss they've suffered.

Fortunately, as I said, it was a single vehicle accident with the trees. There was no third parties hurt or suffering a loss, which I won't say that's a good thing, but it's fortunate that no one was injured or hurt, or suffered loss or whatever. But again, that aggravates the matter and like with a work licence, there's two things you need to prove. One is financial hardship, which generally isn't that difficult. You're either going to lose your job or you're not, but fit and proper person is the harder part. If you're a menace on the road, or if you smash your car into trees while drunk, it's hard to convince a magistrate that you are if fit proper person. And if you can't get up on that leg, your application will fail and you won't get a work licence. You will be off the road for however long the magistrate deems fit.

As I said, filed everything with the court in advance. I'd met the client previously because in Brisbane, the courts won't hear work licence applications on the first date, you've got to adjourn it for a work licence hearing. So that was done on a previous occasion, but met the client again today. Revisited the affidavits, ran through the procedure, what was going to happen? What I was going to most likely say, prosecutor, magistrate, et cetera.

We went in, I guided the magistrates through the key points of the affidavits, spoke on my feet to a certain extent, but no longer than necessary. Look, the short version is I was successful and persuaded the magistrate to grant my client's work licence application. So she was disqualified for seven months, which is quite reasonable given she'd smashed her car into a tree and her reading was 0.126 and she was granted a work licence, but again, work licence granted so she can keep driving for work purposes only 5:00 AM to 10:30 PM, seven days a week. Obviously client's very happy. I'm Andrew Wiseman at Brisbane Magistrate's Court. Thanks for watching.