Michael Pattwell: Low drink driving conviction rates may not be all they seem

The suggestion that more than half of drink-driving cases escape conviction has come as a surprise to me. I am retired from the District Court for over four years but I didn’t think things had changed that much.

In my time on the bench the vast majority of prosecutions dealt with resulted in a conviction. A very odd case would be dismissed on the merits of a successful defence arising from a failure to adhere to the proper procedure or because of an error by the Garda witnesses in giving evidence.

The most common one was the failure of a garda to say the driving was in a “public place” or failure to mention the time. The garda had to have seen the vehicle being driven in a public place within three hours before the test for the presence of alcohol was carried out.

In making a comparison with the much higher conviction rates in other jurisdictions, I wonder if we are comparing like with like. The only way to establish a meaningful conviction rate is to compare the actual number of persons convicted with the actual number of persons whose cases have been fully processed through the courts, either in a fully defended case or where the accused pleads “guilty”. Counting in cases that haven’t yet come before the courts or have been adjourned for one reason or another just skews the statistics. I would be very interested in knowing what the figure would be if it was calculated in the way I am suggesting.

Every now and then, however, there are a number of cases that fail because of a successful legal challenge in the High Court, either to the law as framed or to the procedure adopted. In such cases then, of course, the rate of failed convictions will rise. This, I suspect, is likely to be the case when the most recent legal challenge has been finally dealt with. I refer, of course, to the Avadenei case.

Accused claimed

In that case the accused claimed he should have been given the blood/alcohol test results in both Irish and English. This is stipulated in the legislation. Last month the High Court found in his favour and while the decision is, I understand, under appeal, I see no reason to believe that the result will be any different.

In that event I suspect very many cases will be dismissed on the same basis because the test results are produced by direct printout from the testing devices in the various Garda stations where they are located and that being so I cannot imagine why any one station should be equipped with a device any different from the others.

In that event the conviction rate will, I think, be seen to take a huge fall but, as I already said, that is not comparing like with like. Hand-in-hand with the reported conviction rate for drink-driving offences, the whole sorry system of penalty points has been mentioned.

Some months ago a newspaper article reported that more than 20,000 convicted motorists failed to produce their licences in court between January 2014 and this March. They may have failed to produce their licences but it cannot be said that they have escaped the penalty points, and the consequences of not disclosing them to such as insurance companies could be dire indeed.

In the vast majority of those cases events occurred that made the matching of identities of people caught breaking the road traffic laws (usually for speeding) with driving licences impossible.

An awful lot can happen in the three years or 10 years a driving licence is valid. A large number of people will, within those time periods, change addresses. When a person is caught, down the line, having committed a motoring offence they will be traced, for the purpose of imposing a penalty and allocating penalty points, using the registration number of the vehicle being driven at the time. For many people the address a vehicle is registered at can be an entirely different address to the one the person had when a driving licence was taken out some years earlier. One registers one’s vehicle using the address one is living in at that relevant time; not at the address one may have had some years earlier when a licence was taken out. Hence, the two addresses don’t match and it becomes impossible to attach the consequential penalty points to a particular licence.

There is a way to right that wrong but it is controversial and I cannot see this, or any government that I can imagine, having the courage to defy the screaming paranoia of some civil liberties advocates and introduce a national identity card with a national identity number.

PPS number

We already have the national identity number in the form of the PPS number. Each and every one of us has been allocated such a number from a very early age or, for immigrants, once they come on the public record in this country.

A person’s PPS/national identity number should be recorded on every driver’s licence and its record; that would be one database. When a person acquires a vehicle, either new or secondhand, they are required to register that vehicle or notify the vehicle licensing authority of the change of ownership. Such registration or notification should include the owners PPS/national identity number. That would establish another database.

The problem of recording penalty points would be solved because matches could be easily made between the two databases. Where a vehicle is being driven by other than its owner there is already an efficient procedure for establishing who the driver was.

It would, however, take political will to do it.

Michael Pattwell is a retired District Court judge