#132 Toogoolawah Drink Driving

Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at Toogoolawah 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 Toogoolawah Magistrates Court, which is, I guess, about half an hour northwest of Ipswich. Client was charged with high range, drink driving, a reading of 0.194. So as you'd imagine, that's almost four times the legal limit. That is high range drink driving. There was a collision. He's basically clipped a parked car and collided with a tree and written his own vehicle off. There wasn't a significant amount of damage to the other vehicle. But as I said, he wrote his own vehicle off, wrapped it around a tree. Worst case is a lifetime loss of licence.

The magistrate's got the discretion to give, as I said, an absolute disqualification, lifetime. Mandatory minimum's technically six months, but that kicks in at 0.15. And as I said, my client's well over that, 0.194 with a collision. So it was never going to be the mandatory minimum six months. It's just unreasonable to suggest to a client that they might get away with such a light penalty, and it'd be unreasonable to ask a magistrate to give it, but that said, my job is, one, of getting the disqualification down as low as possible.

He can't get a work licence. The cut off for a work licence is 0.149, so soon as you hit 0.15, it's a guillotine cutoff. It's just not an option. So work licence is not an option. As I said, my job is one of getting the disqualification down as low as possible.

As far as preparing goes, I asked my client to do a reformatory course, which can be done online. got him to get references based on the template that we give all of our clients. I got instructions from him prior to today that allowed me to prepare my submissions. Drove up this morning, met my client at court. We grabbed a conference room, ran through everything that I was going to say and what he can expect to happen.

I did have to speak on my feet a reasonable amount. Obviously, 0.194 with a collision, I had my work cut out for me trying to get it down as low as possible. I spoke at length about his lack of history, which was a good thing. The difficulties he'd been suffering in his personal life leading up to today, or sorry, the day in question. Steps he'd taken since to try and reform. Look, the long and short of it is I was successful in getting it down to seven months. So my client got a seven months to qualification. Modest fine.

He's obviously relieved. He could very well have got, with that reading, as I said, 0.194 and a collision, 18 months if he had to come by himself, or with someone that doesn't specialise. But as I said, seven months. That starts today. He can't drive for the next seven months, but after seven months he gets his licence back. Understandably, he's quite relieved. I'm Andrew Wiseman. Thanks for watching.