DRINK DRIVING SOLICITOR

We were very lucky here but it's an example of working hard to ensure that every aspect of a case is properly examined. Every successful prosecution contains multiple procedural legal steps that must be proven by the prosecution. Once you know what each one of those steps are, you know what has to be proven at each step. You also know that if there is an error in one or more of these steps it can lead to a drink driving case being dismissed. Some may call this a drink driving technicality or they may more commonly be referred to in this country as drink driving technicalities Ireland but they can make the difference between a successful prosecution case and a drink driving case dismissed.

Learning how to get off with drink driving charges may be difficult but is not impossible. Here's a tip: the only thing that matters is what's said in court. What do I mean by this? In every case your lawyer will receive disclosure in the case. Disclosure is the police statements, documentation from the Medical Bureau of Road Safety as well as documents from the postal services, among others. Sometimes you may find that having read the disclosure, nothing 'fatal' to the prosecution case turns up. In other words, the prosecution case appears strong. But the Judge hearing your case wont see the prosecution disclosure. You and your lawyer will but the Judge wont. This is because the disclosure could contain information that is prejudicial to you and in any case, the Judge will make a decision based on an impartial hearing of the evidence. Defending a drink driving charge means knowing what legal 'proofs' the prosecution must establish in court. Then you listen carefully to the evidence that's given in court to see if all of the essential proofs were said in evidence. Experienced lawyers recognise quickly what happens in court for drink driving and prepare accordingly. In many cases they are, but in many cases they are not. Why is this? Giving evidence in court is difficult. The witness box is a pressurized place to be and we humans sometimes make mistakes in these pressurized environments. If that happens you need to be able to understand (your lawyer will know) what should be said in court and -more importantly- what the significance can be if important evidential details are forgotten about or omitted completely. If this happens it can lead to a drink driving case dismissed. These are known as drink driving technicalities

No. They cant, or at least won't, unless the case is catastrophically flawed and incapable of succeeding at trial. Where the State realise that major legal errors in a case exist they will often very pragmatically and sensibly decide to withdraw the case. This isn't spoken about very often but the reason why the courts in this country operate so well, even smoothly, is often because of the pragmatism and common sense shown by the State. In my experience, while they take their jobs seriously and will prosecute cases as best they can, they do not -unlike their counterparts in some other countries- move 'heaven and earth' to 'bring home a prosecution', no matter what. Such restraint and, in many cases, decency, is not often commented upon or given credit. But it should be.

Can a judge infer that something happened or was said? In the vast majority of criminal cases they cannot, or rather they should not. Inferences are usually only reserved for civil law cases, where the burden of proof is 'the balance of probabilities' i.e. that it is more likely than not that an event occurred. Inferring something in criminal trials is limited to exceptional instances. This is because the burden of proof, proof 'beyond a reasonable doubt', requires a level of satisfaction on the part of the judge that is approaching certainty. This doesn't mean a judge cant have any doubt. They can, but the doubt must only be a reasonable one. If it is not, if the judge assess the doubt that they may have as more than that -beyond a reasonable doubt- they should acquit. But inferences in criminal law do exist, albeit in very limited circumstances. So if a judge can infer something in road traffic law, when can they do so? There are some examples. Just imagine a person is lying in bed trying to sleep and then they hear a loud bang outside their house. They get up and rush to the window and look out. They see a man slumped over the wheel of a car with smoke rising from the engine. In this scenario, even where the person did not see the accident taking place, the courts have ruled that a judge could infer that the accident had just taken place. While this scenario is helpful, it is unusual. The vast majority of occurrences in a criminal trial are not nearly so clearcut and simple. They often require a judge to assess one part of the evidence or the other. But if the assessment requires inferring that something must have happened (based on the surrounding evidence) caution needs to be maintained.

One of the most prized human faculties is judgment. As Stuart Sutherland wrote in “Irrationality, the Enemy Within” many people “find it more hurtful to be accused of having poor intuition than of being slovenly, lazy or selfish”. The 17th century French moralist and writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld went even further when he wrote that “Everyone complains about the badness of his memory, nobody about his judgement”. “There are only a few dissenting voices’ writes Sutherland, ‘for example it has been said that intuition is that strange instinct that tells a person that he is right, whether he is or not”. Why is this? We are relatively happy to critique our failing memory because society doesn’t regard this as anything more or less than a temporary state of affairs that affects almost all of us on a regular basis. But the faculty of judgement is different. We never question our judgment because to do so is almost universally recognised as an admission of weakness, or at least failure. This is likely because ‘judgement’ is an inherent skill and having poor judgment usually leads disaster, whether large or small. When political leaders make disastrous decisions, they frequently try to cast the blame far and wide. President George W. Bush’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was not regarded as the colossal geopolitical disaster of the 21st century that it was. Instead, it was quickly refashioned -by the pliant media- into a 'failure of intelligence' i.e. the intelligence community in the United States were blamed for ‘faulty intelligence’ that led to the president’s abysmal judgment. The fact that this was not even remotely the case was ‘memory-holed’ by the media in the United States who had long ago abandoned their responsibility to the American public to hold the government to account, becoming in the process little more than a discredited propaganda outlet of the Executive. It is undoubtedly the case that when people commit road traffic offences like drink driving, they find it a crushing personal failure in part because the decision was theirs and theirs alone, and there is no mechanism to pass the blame to anyone else.

This may seem counter intuitive but bear with me. The cost, in monetary terms, of defending drink driving cases can be high. There is also additional costs, to the administration of justice. Because the penalty for conviction is automatic disqualification no matter what, this means that a motorist will be disqualified if convicted. If you have a partner, children and mortgage to pay, this reality is simply not bearable. If you want to stay on the road you have no option but to fight the case. This means that a significant number of drink driving cases now occupy a sizeable proportion of trial lists across the country. That pushes other cases down the list. Isn't there a better way? I think that there is, and I explain why I think that here.

Blood tests were first legally introduced in some states in the United States in the 1930's for people arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. A major issue that arose early was whether the law could demand that someone help the prosecution in prosecuting and possibly convicting them, by demanding a sample of blood be taken from them. Surely this was an invasion of a person's right to bodily integrity? Another problem was applying criminal liability to someone who refused to allow blood be taken from them. How could you "square" the imposition of a criminal conviction on someone who hadn't done something i.e. hadn't given a blood sample? Was that even legal? Surely this flew in the face of what the criminal law was set up to do i.e. punish people for things they had actually done, as opposed to what they had not done? The trump card that the state used to get around these difficult legal issues was "the public good". A person's rights are not absolute. They do have limits. If your actions harm the public good then, as between your rights and the public's, you will often end up losing. So the law accepted that in was in the public's interests that the public at large be protected in public places from people who drove their vehicles while drunk. This right, the public safety right, was deemed to trump the individual motorist's right to refuse to provide a blood sample if they were arrested for drunken driving. That made it perfectly legal to convict and ban a motorist from driving who had not provided a blood sample when demanded.