Case report: successful submissions to the prosecution

EG was found drinking at the wheel of her car

A few weeks ago, Nick Diable of London Drink Driving Solicitor was instructed to represent a woman, who we’ll call EG, accused of drink driving.

The allegation was that on a recent Friday night she was drink driving her car while she had 64mg of alcohol in 100ml of breath.

Nick met EG before the first hearing took place – we always try to meet our clients well before court as that gives us the best opportunity to understand their account and gives them a chance to meet and ask questions of the solicitor who will represent them in court.  EG’s account was that she had driven to a night out with some friends.  The friends had been drinking during the journey and, although EG had consumed alcohol prior to driving she did not believe she would have been over the drink driving limit.  Once at their destination, EG parked her car and accepted some drinks from her friends.  This is called the hip flask defence and is so named because in the past men frequently carried hip flasks from which they would drink after crashing their cars.  It was said they did this to calm their nerves but it also effectively prevents a court finding against them in a drink driving trial, so who knows the real reason behind its origins.

EG accepted that she had been in her car with the lights on and engine running when she became over the drink driving limit and that she may have driven again that evening while she remained above the drink driving limit.  Nick advised her that on this account she was guilty of being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle but that the penalty would be either a short driving ban or 10 penalty points, i.e. far less harsh than a sentence for drink driving.  EG stated she was happy with 10 penalty points and would plead guilty to being drunk in charge if the prosecution could be persuaded by Nick to offer it.  A plan was agreed that Nick would obtain and consider the prosecution evidence.  If appropriate he would make representations that they should drop the case against EG.

We immediately asked for the prosecution evidence and received it the week before the first court appearance.  After analysing the evidence, it was clear that the prosecution lacked sufficient evidence to secure a conviction but could gain a conviction for being drunk in charge.  We made immediate representations to the prosecution that they should discontinue the drink driving charge – we deliberately did not ask them to substitute a charge of being drunk in charge because we are here to represent our client’s best interests not to advise the prosecution on potential charges they could bring against our client.  It has to be said that if they thought they could get a drink driving conviction based on the evidence they sent to us then you have to question whether they are at all familiar with drink driving law.

A prosecution solicitor who was clearly more familiar with drink driving law reviewed the evidence at court and agreed to substitute the drink driving charge for one of being drunk in charge.  This is a significant difference.  An alcohol reading of 64mg in breath on a drink driving charge would mean a 17 to 22 month driving ban plus a fine of 150% of EG’s weekly income.  Whereas a guilty plea to being drunk in charge would mean at worst a short driving ban and a fine of 100% of weekly income.

EG was very happy to plead to being drunk in charge as she accepted that she had committed the offence and should not have done so.

Nick Diable represented EG in court, telling the court that EG is a professional woman who recently graduated from university, holds a good job and has never been in trouble before – this is called personal mitigation.  Nick explained the circumstances of the offence and that EG fully accepted her guilty and offered the court her genuine apologies for committing the offence – this is mitigating the offence.  Learning how to mitigate is a very important skill for any criminal law solicitor and one I have discussed previously in other blogs.

The District Judge listened carefully and agreed to significantly reduce the sentence.  Instead of the short driving ban the judge could have imposed, he awarded 10 penalty points.  Instead of the 100% of weekly income fine that he would normally impose, the judge more than halved the fine.

EG was very happy with the sentence.

So, we can see that when a solicitor takes time to meet face to face with a client to discuss their case in detail, examines the prosecution evidence properly and acts on that information spectacular results can be achieved.

It’s always worth asking at the end of a case, how else could this have been approached?  The most obvious answer is that we could have kept quiet about the flaws in the prosecution case and gone to trial on the drink driving charge.  That was an option explained to EG, but she had very clear goals: first to end the case as quickly and cheaply as possible; secondly to keep her driving licence.  Taking the drink driving charge to trial would have been very good for us because it would allow us to charge EG more money, but that does not fit with EG’s stated goals.  One thing we will always do at London Drink Driving Solicitor is to work with a client to find out what they want to achieve in a case and then present the best options for achieving those goals, even if it means we can’t charge as much money because providing sound, honest advice is what we are all about.

If you would like to discuss a drink driving or drunk in charge case with Nick Diable get in touch on 020 8242 4440 or visit our website.

Special reasons: spiked drinks

Can you always tell whether anything has been added to your drink?

If a person is convicted of (or pleads guilty to) an offence of drink driving the court is required to disqualify them for a minimumof one-year (or three years if the person has a previous conviction within the past 10 years).  However, the court candecide not to disqualify if there is a special reason.  A common special reason is that a drink has been spiked (or laced if you prefer) with additional alcohol.

The law is relatively straightforward, the case of Pugsley v Hunter tells us that it is for the defendant to prove on the balance of probabilities, i.e. that what the defence says is more likely to be true than not.

Pugsley also gives us a test the court should apply when deciding whether there is a special reason, the three things the defence must convince the court of are that:

1.       The drink was spiked;

2.       The defendant did not know and had no reason to suspect his drink had been spiked; and

3.       But for the additional alcohol the defendant would not have exceeded the drink driving limit at the time he drove.

So far so simple, but how do we prove any of those things?  The best evidence is to get the person who spiked the drink to come to court.  They rarely get into trouble because most of the time it is done by somebody who doesn’t realise the defendant would go on to drive or it happens inadvertently.  If the spiker won’t come to court then we fall back on hearsay evidence – this is evidence that is not normally admissible but can be admitted if the court feels it is in the interests of justice of if the Crown agrees to it being given in court.  In very rare circumstances it gets through the backdoor, e.g. in an expert report the prosecution don’t read properly and object to in time.

Evidence of whether the defendant knew or should have known his drink had been spiked can only come from him or her.  Usually, the defendant should describe how the drink tasted compared to what he expected and what effect it had upon him after he drank it.  It can often be helpful to make a comparison to another well-known drink, e.g. “the spiked drink would be 12% alcohol, so no stronger than an average glass of wine”.

Finally, the defence must prove that the defendant would not have exceeded the drink driving limit at the time he drove but for the additional alcohol.  Pugsley v Hunter tells us that in most cases this must be done by expert evidence, the only exception is where it would be obvious to the layman that but for the additional alcohol he would not have exceeded the drink driving limit – such cases are very rare.  The expert uses the Widmark formula to calculate the likely blood-alcohol concentration (often called “BAC”) both at the time of driving and at the time the police took their specimen.  The additional calculation to the time of the specimen makes it very difficult for defendants to lie about their alcohol consumption and get the amounts correct – this is a fact that courts often fail to appreciate.

The law is reasonably simple in spiked drinks cases, the key is presenting the law in a clear and straightforward way, ensuring that the evidence is gathered correctly and put before the court in the best possible light to support your case.  In that respect an expert solicitor who has experience preparing and presenting these cases is the most important thing any defendant can find for themselves.

Does a guilty plea reduce a driving disqualification?

Should a judge reduce a driving disqualification if the defendant pleads guilty?

In most cases, somebody who pleads guilty to an allegation will receive a reduction in the length of the sentence imposed upon them, this is because section 144 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 requires the sentencing court to take into account when the guilty plea was entered and the circumstances of the plea.

Criminal solicitors often talk about a defendant being “entitled to a sentence discount” in return for a guilty plea, this is not a true reflection of the law but in practice most courts will give a reduction to most offenders.

As this is a blog dedicated to drink driving law, we should look at what happens in those cases specifically and what we find is that the courts have historically being reluctant to discount the disqualification portion of sentences imposed upon drink drivers.  This is because many solicitors and judges consider the disqualification to be ancillary to the sentence rather than part of it.

I take the view that this approach is incorrect.  While a driving disqualification can be an ancillary order, (e.g. section 301 Criminal Justice Act 2003 allows a court to impose a driving disqualification where somebody fails to pay their court fines) that does not mean that it must always be so.  In this post I will set out the law both at home in England and Wales, in Scotland and the position according to the European Court of Human Rights .

Domestic law

First, if we look at the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, we find that Act gives the power to courts to impose penalty points and disqualification and it is worth noting that both powers are to be found in Part 2 of the Act, which is headed “SENTENCE”.  This to my mind is a strong suggestion that Parliament intended the driving disqualification to be part of the sentence and not an ancillary order.

Secondly, we can look at the case of Gemmell v HM’s Advocate; this is a Scottish appeal case in which the court was asked to rule whether a driving disqualification and penalty points formed part of the sentence.  Lord Justice Clerk headed a five judge panel and held, “[i]n my opinion, a period of disqualification from driving is a penalty… As such it is a ‘sentence… or other disposal or order.’”  He went on, “I consider that sentence discounting applies also to the imposition of penalty points for road traffic offences… The imposition of penalty points is a form of order that falls within the ambit of section 196.”  It should be noted that the court was considering the same Road Traffic Act and Road Traffic Offenders Act that is in force in England and Wales.  Also, the section 196 that Lord Justice Clerk refers to is the Scottish law version of section 144 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003; the relevant sections, contain identical wording.

Lord Eassie expanded on Lord Justice Clerk’s view in the same case saying, “I… agree with the view which is held by your Lordship in the Chair that being banned from driving or receiving penalty points are not distinguishable in principle from sentences generally when questions of discounting arise. Being disqualified from driving is a restriction on the liberty which the offender would otherwise enjoy to drive a motor vehicle; commonly presents substantial inconvenience; and may have financial consequences including the loss of employment.”

Decisions by Scottish courts are not binding on those in England and Wales but, where such senior judges have provided such detailed and thought out opinions they should not be ignored, although they frequently are in certain magistrates’ courts.

To the best of my knowledge no English court has directly considered whether a driving disqualification imposed on a defendant convicted of drink driving should be subject to the reduction in sentence commonly given; however, the case of R v Geale gives the matter a passing thought.  Geale is concerned with the sentence of a coach driver convicted of causing death by careless driving and whether a reduction in disqualification should be given if the driving disqualification is going to impact upon the offender’s livelihood.  But, the court does say in passing (or “obiter” as solicitors prefer to say) that the purpose of disqualification is to protect the public from the risk of re-offending, “[h]owever, such risk is not the only relevant criterion… In addition, there is or maybe an element of punishment; as is apparent from the fact that, even where the future risk is nil, the statutory provisions require a 12 month minimum period of disqualification.”  Although the court was talking about death by careless driving, the statutory provisions also require a 12 month minimum period of disqualification in drink driving cases.

Finally, when we look at the sentencing guidelines we see that the disqualification period is listed as part of the sentence and not under the section of the guideline that deals with ancillary orders.

Law from the European Court of Human Rights

The case of Welch v The United Kingdom involved a drug dealer attempting to convince the European Court of Human Rights that a confiscation order formed part of his sentence.  He lost, but the court considered when a court order is a penalty rather than anything else - and, if it is a penalty, then it must follow that it forms part of the sentence imposed upon that individual.  

First, they told us that a penalty is an “autonomous Convention concept”, which is to say that it does not rely on the domestic law of any of the Convention states, in other words it doesn’t much matter what domestic law thinks of the order in question.  Secondly, the Court tells us that when deciding if a court order is a penalty the first thing you must consider is whether “… the measure in question is imposed following conviction for a ‘criminal offence’”.  If it is then you consider other factors, such as:

·         Nature and purpose of the order;

·         It’s characterisation under national law;

·         Procedures involved in marking and implementing the order; and

·         It’s severity

In the case of a driving disqualification, there can be no dispute that a driving offence is a criminal conviction.  What is the purpose of the disqualification?  According to R v Geale the purpose of the disqualification is to protect other road users, but even the Court in Geale accepts that there is an element of punishment to the disqualification and Gemmell describes the disqualification as a deprivation of liberty.  What is the procedure for making and implementing the order?  The disqualification is imposed after conviction and during the sentencing portion of the case.  The court hears mitigation and varies the length of the disqualification accordingly, just as it does with any other sentence.  Once imposed, the disqualification is enforced through the immediate seizure of the defendant’s driving licence and the circulation of the disqualification to police forces nationwide.  How severe is the sentence?  In some cases, it will cost the defendant their job and their home; that seems pretty severe to me.

In Malige v France the European Court of Human rights considered whether the deduction of points (apparently in France a driving conviction loses you points rather than gaining them) amounted to a penalty.  The Court echoed the thoughts of our own Court of Appeal in Geale when they said that, “… although the deduction of points has a preventive character, it also has a punitive and deterrent character and is accordingly similar to a secondary penalty.  The fact that Parliament intended to dissociate the sanction of deducting points from the other penalties imposed by the criminal courts cannot change the nature of the measure.”

Based on Welch and Malige, we can see that the European Court of Human Rights views both driving disqualifications and the imposition of penalty points as part of the sentence imposed on a guilty defendant. 

Conclusion

It is clear that the European Court of Human Rights views disqualifications and points as part of the sentence, just as the Scottish court of appeal did when they considered the same issue.

English courts have not explicitly said that driving disqualifications are part of the sentence or that they should be reduced after a guilty plea - and many magistrates refuse to believe that it is - but given the authorities from Scotland and Europe it seems inevitable that they will eventually have to accept that driving disqualifications can indeed be reduced.

Special reasons: faulty home breathalyser

The Alcosense Elite is the breathalyser I use at home

Many of us keep a breathalyser at home to check that we are safe to drive the day after drinking (okay and maybe sometimes to see who can handle their drink best) but what if the machine gets it wrong?

At heart, most of the home breathalysers work using an infrared detector to count the number of alcohol molecules passing over the sensor; this is exactly how the police’s roadside breathalysers work.  It’s even how the Camic Datamaster and Lion Intoxilyser (two of the three evidential breath machines used in police stations) work – the Intoximeter EC/IR uses both infrared and fuel cell technology.  Given that they use the same technology as their professional counterparts you may well assume that the home breathalysers will be as reliable, but some reports have suggested that the home breathalysers are unreliable.

We are solicitors not toxicology experts so we are not going to consider the reliability of home breathalysers.  Instead we will look at what happens if you rely on one only to be let down.

Let’s clear one question up right away – if your breathalyser says you are under the limit but the police say you were over the limit, can that be a defence? No.  The law is quite simple, if you drive on a road or other public place with excess alcohol you are guilty of drink driving, it doesn’t matter why you did it.

But, the really interesting question (well to me, but then I am a solicitor who specialises in drink driving law) is whether reliance on a home breathalyser can amount to a special reason for not disqualifying.

Now, the court must disqualify a drink driver for a minimum of 12 months unless there is a special reason not to do so.  Way back in 1939 the High Court in Northern Ireland said that a special reason is something that should be considered by the court when it passes sentence and should be “directly connected with the commission of the offence”.  This was incorporated into English law when Lord Goddard gave judgment in the 1946 case of Whittal v Kirby.  But, it wasn’t until 1958 in the case of R  v Wickens that we finally got the modern definition of a special reason.  Mr Justice Devlin set out four points for a defendant to prove if he wishes to avail himself of special reasons.  The reason must:

1.       Be an extenuating or mitigating circumstance;

2.       Not amount to a defence to the allegation;

3.       Be directly connected with the commission of the offence;

4.       Be one that the court should properly take into account when imposing sentence.

This test has been severely restricted by subsequent cases; however, I have yet to find a case where somebody has relied on a malfunctioning breathalyser as a special reason – though this area of law is hardly fast moving when the main cases are over half a century old.

Broadly speaking special reasons in drink driving can be split into three categories: those explaining how the defendant came to be over the drink driving limit; reasons explaining why he or she drove above the limit; and anything else.

Let’s think about our situation where a man, we’ll call him Gary, has been out drinking one evening.  The following morning, he gets up, feels fine and blows into his breathalyser.  The breathalyser shows a reading of 20 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of breath, a reading well below the drink driving limit.  Gary decides he’s safe to drive.  Shortly after leaving home, Gary is involved in a minor road traffic accident, the police arrive and breathalyse him.  The roadside test comes back showing Gary is over the limit – the evidential breath test at the police station confirms this and Gary is charged with drink driving.

Gary’s account is one that explains why he drove while over the limit.  But does it meet the other criteria?

Is being misled by a malfunctioning breathalyser mitigating or extenuating?  I would say that it is because it goes to show that Gary was being careful and attempting to avoid drink driving – it was not something that he set out or wanted to do.  That is mitigating in my book.

Is Gary’s account a defence in law to drink driving?  Nope.

Is his account directly connected with the commission of the offence?  Yes.  If Gary is to be believed, he was being as careful and would not have driven had the breathalyser indicated he was over the drink driving limit.  He therefore only drove because he was misled by the device he purchased to prevent him drink driving.

Should the court take this into account when passing sentence?  That’s a matter for the magistrates but I would be surprised if a court said no.

So, on the face of it a misleading reading from a home breathalyser is capable of amounting to a special reason.

If you have been accused of drink driving you can get expert legal advice from London Drink Driving Solicitor on 020 8242 4440.

Can liquor chocolates put you over the drink driving limit?

Liquor chocolates can result in very high alcohol readings on police breath tests

With Christmas nearly upon us the UK’s consumption of tiny chocolates filled with one type of booze or another is about to skyrocket.  As a specialist drink driving solicitor, one question I have been asked a few times over the years by friends and family is whether it is possible to eat so many liquor chocolates that you exceed the drink driving limit?

In England and Wales, the drink driving limit is 35 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of breath.  The number of drinks it takes to reach the drink driving limit depends on how strong the drink it, how heavy you are, how tall you are and whether you are a man or a woman.

In 1999, two researches named Hylen and Jones ran a small experiment with three participants who had not consumed alcohol prior to the experiment.  The aim of the experiment was to test whether the alcohol from two liquor chocolates could affect a breath test like those used by the police.  The results showed categorically that yes liquor chocolates do have a massive impact… but only for a very short amount of time.

One minute after eating the chocolates all three volunteers produced extremely high readings – the highest being 87 mgs per 100 ml of breath or nearly two and a half times to the drink driving limit!  At two and a half minutes the highest reading had fallen to 24 mg per 100 ml, which is below the drink driving limit.  By the time of the last test six minutes after eating the two chocolates the highest reading produced was just 5 mg per 100 ml.

In 1984 a researcher called Pribilla decided to give five lucky volunteers an early Christmas present – each volunteer was given one hour to eat as many brandy chocolates as they could shovel down their gullets, Pribilla administered a breath test 30 minutes after the last chocolate was eaten and then proceeded to take blood samples every 30 minutes for two hours.

Pribilla failed to detect any alcohol in 3 of the volunteers and in the other two found just a trace level of alcohol.

So, can liquor chocolates affect a breath test at the police station?  In the very short term, yes they can have a massive effect.  In the middle to long term no they will have no impact whatsoever… except that if you eat too much chocolate you’ll feel sick, as all five of Pribilla’s volunteers did.

Should you find yourself accused of drink driving this Christmas you can get expert legal advice from a specialist drink driving solicitor by calling 020 8242 4440.

Heartburn and drink driving

Up to 12.8 million people in UK could be at risk of false high alcohol readings
as a result of chronic heartburn

Drink driving convictions usually rely on a breath test to prove that the driver was above the drink driving limit.  An interesting problem arises when somebody who has drunk a small amount of alcohol provides a specimen of breath but brings up gas from their stomach at the same time causing a false high alcohol reading.

In researching this topic I’ve seen judges call this stomach gas all kinds of things like “heartburn”, “air”, “eructation”, “burps” and “mouth alcohol”.  Whatever you choose to call it quite clearly if you have been drinking and bring gas up from your stomach there is every chance that it will contain some of the alcohol that is still in your stomach.  If you happen to be providing a specimen of breath when this happens, then it is entirely possible that some of the alcohol from your stomach will be blown into the machine and give a false reading that does not reflect how much alcohol is actually in your breath.

This is a bigger problem than you might think.  Research has shown that 20% of the US population suffer chronic heartburn with symptoms appearing at least once a week while 7% have daily symptoms.  If that holds true in the UK that would mean there are 12.8 million people who may find themselves giving a surprisingly high alcohol reading at the police station.

You would think that if the specimen of breath does not accurately reflect the amount of alcohol in your breath that the test would be unreliable and so you would have a defence.  Unfortunately, this is not how the courts see things.  In the case of Zafar v DPP, the court was asked to define the word “breath” and it came to a rather surprising decision.  The court ruled that “breath” means “air exhaled from any thing”.  With respect to the court that is a nonsensical definition – breath is air exhaled from the lungs of a living creature – that is the definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, despite what the court claimed in Zafar.  It cannot include air exhaled from other bodily orifices, nor can it include air exhaled from something that is not alive.  Nonetheless, the court’s definition could easily include flatulence and I seriously doubt that the court would agree somebody was trying to provide if they farted into the Intoximeter.

This bizarre definition was upheld by a subsequent court in the case of Woolfe v DPP, which means that we are probably stuck with this nonsense until another case reaches a higher court in the future.

Because the court has said that gas from the stomach counts as breath the fact that you brought up additional alcohol from your stomach would not give you a defence to drink driving.

But, all is not lost because if you are one of the many people who suffer chronic heartburn (properly known as gastro-oesophageal reflux disease) and you do produce a false high reading then you can rely on your condition to provide you with a special reason to avoid the disqualification that normally follows a drink driving conviction.

In the case of Ng v DPP, O Sang Ng pleaded guilty to drink driving and argued that he should not be disqualified as his chronic heartburn amounted to a special reason not to disqualify him.  The District Judge refused his case saying that the raised level of alcohol in Ng’s breath was special to Ng not to the offence (special reasons must relate to the offence not the offender) and that Zafar v DPP prevented the judge taking account of the false high reading caused by the gas from Ng’s stomach.

The High Court re-considered Ng’s case and ruled that the district judge was wrong on both counts.  First, the High Court said, “the evidence upon which the appellants sought to rely went directly to the commission of the offence. If accepted it could provide an explanation as to why the level of alcohol in the appellant's breath exceeded the prescribed level” – so heartburn explained why Ng provided a specimen over the limit; it related to the offence not the offender.

Next, the High Court considered whether the district judge had got the law right when she considered the case of Zafar.  Again, the High Court ruled that the district judge had got the law wrong and that Zafar’s case did not prevent somebody relying on chronic heartburn to keep their driving licence.

So, while a rather peculiar interpretation of the English language will prevent you relying on chronic heartburn as a defence (even where you were not actually over the limit or impaired); a sensible interpretation of that peculiar case means that you will still be able to keep your driving licence.

If you have been accused of drink driving and need legal advice from an expert solicitor who specialised in drink driving law then contact the London Drink Driving Solicitor on 020 8242 4440.

Case report: failing to provide

Police officers must give breath test instructions clearly so that suspect
understand what they are required to do when they provide a specimen

When a person is suspected of drink driving the police are empowered to require the suspect to provide a specimen of breath and refusing to do so is a criminal offence.  Effectively, the law forces the suspect to give evidence that can be used against him or her in a subsequent trial – ordinarily, the police cannot force a suspect to give evidence against themselves.  For this reason, the law is quite strict with police officers and requires them to follow the set procedure fully.  Deviation from the procedure can provide a defence both to drink driving and failing to provide offences.

The case we will talk about today is just such an example of a police officer failed to comply with the breath test procedure and ended up being made to look a fool at court.

Our case began in September 2014 when our client was arrested on suspicion of drink driving and driving with no insurance.  At the police station he agreed to provide a specimen of breath but ultimately failed to do so.  The client was unable to explain why he could not provide but said he did everything he was asked to do but did not really understand the procedure.  The client in this case speaks conversational English well enough to do his job as a builder but anything else is beyond his ability – or at least it was in 2014 when he was new to the UK.

Our first thought was that if our client did everything required but could not comply then perhaps there was a medical problem.  Unfortunately, at the first hearing in the case the prosecution did not bother to serve all their evidence – this happens regularly.  The case was adjourned for a trial.

At the first hearing, we served a copy of the insurance certificate on the prosecutor proving that our client was insured.  We subsequently served a further two copies by post and in person at a subsequent hearing.  Remarkably, at the trial the prosecution had managed to lose all three copies!

Shortly after the first hearing, we obtained the prosecutor’s evidence, which included CCTV of the procedure; it was immediately obvious that our client had failed to provide a specimen of breath because the police officer had not told him what to do.  The video showed a police officer who was difficult, unhelpful and impatient.  The police officer had arranged a telephone interpreter but had breached several points of his police force’s policy on the use of interpreters.  In addition, the interpreter had been cut off less than half way through the procedure so our client had no instructions he could understand about how to complete the breath test procedure.

The big problem for us was getting the prosecution to pay attention to their own case and review it properly.  Something that they refused to do for 14 months after the first appearance.

This morning, we attended for the trial.  We found a prosecutor who had not yet managed to watch the CCTV or speak to her police officer.  We encouraged the prosecutor to watch the CCTV – indeed our advocate sat with the prosecutor and took her through the footage.  Afterwards, the prosecutor spoke to the police officer (she described him as “awful”, which is a pretty damning indictment of a police officer’s attitude).  After hearing representation from our advocate at court it was obvious that the prosecution could never prove their case and they offered no evidence, the result being that our client was found not guilty of failing to provide.

The prosecutor also became the first member of the Crown Prosecution Service to take the time to examine the insurance certificate and was forced to admit that he was not guilty of driving with no insurance either.

Our client was acquitted of both charges against him and a Defence Costs Order was made in his favour allowing him to recover his legal costs.

If you are facing court for an allegation of drink driving or failing to provide a specimen, then do not hesitate to contact London’snumber 1 drink driving specialist solicitor: the London Drink Driving Solicitor on 020 8242 4440.