Join Wiseman Lawyers Traffic Lawyer Andrew Wiseman at Richlands Magistrates Court as he represents a client charged with Repeat Disqualified 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 Richlands Magistrate’s Court. Client was charged with repeat disqualified driving, meaning court ordered disqualified driving. So when someone goes to court for drink driving or whatever and the court disqualifies them, and you get caught during that court order disqualification, the penalties are quite severe. For a first offence, it’s a minimum two year disqualification. There’s no maximum. The magistrate’s got a discretion to give a lifetime disqualification if they see fit. But this client was a habitual offender. He’s from New South Wales and all of his previous was in New South Wales. It was more than 10. I lost count on how many previous he had, but it was over 10. He’d had multiple different penalties, including actual jail in New South Wales and if you’ve already been to jail before for disqualified driving, they generally don’t go backwards. They normally go forward. So more jail, longer period, et cetera.
So obviously the stakes were extremely high. And I literally made it clear to the client both verbally and in writing that there was really only a 25% chance of keeping him out, meaning there was a 75% chance that he was going to go in and serve actual custody today. He’s had four months of actual custody in the past. If he was going to go in, we were talking six months plus, unless I was able to work my magic, for want of a better word. That said, in order to pull out all stops, there was a number of steps that myself, that I took, and that I got the client to take. I got him to do the course that we get everyone to do, got him to get references. I sent him off to his GP and psychologist, he’s got underlying mental health issues, to come up with some kind of report or documents, sort of trying to address the underlying behaviour that leads to this offending. Got him to get references, as I said, based on the template we give all of our clients.
In addition to that, I did up written submissions of case law. There’s not a lot of case law out there that helps a client such as mine. People every day of the week go to… Not my clients, but you see people either self-represented or with lawyers that don’t specialise in traffic law, going to jail for their third disqualified. Third or fourth, bang in you go, see you in four months. And when you hear 10, 11, 12, so on, and you’ve done jail before, it’s the case of how much jail this time, as opposed to whether or not you actually go in.
That said the last offence was in 2014. While that’s on a massive amount of time ago, it was four, almost five years ago, so there’s been some kind of window of pulling his head in. Further to that, the person he was four years ago was just a young, fool, single, nothing to live for, no responsibilities, nothing to lose if he was to go back into jail. Whereas in the time since then, he’s found love, married his wife, they got a nine month old child and basically, yeah, last time he was just a fool with nothing to lose. This time, he’s a responsible parent with everything to lose. So my job was to try and get the disqualification down as low as possible and avoid imprisonment. But at the end of the day, the disqualification was the least of his concerns. It was all about at the first instance, trying to avoid imprisonment. And then if imprisonment was absolutely going to happen, then it was about trying to get the length of imprisonment down as long as possible.
Look, it was hard work. I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t. But I’m not going to speak in this recording longer than I need to. The long and short of it is I was successful in persuading the magistrate not to send my client back to jail. So he received another two year disqualification and a fine. He got to go home, seen his family, and now heading back to the airport, the three of them, rather than just mum and baby. Yeah, hard work. I’m a bit worn out because obviously these high risk of jail matters take quite a bit of effort, so I’ll leave it at that. So another very, very, very, extremely relieved client. I’m Andrew Wiseman at Richlands Magistrates Court. Thanks for watching.