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Find her guilty. Give her a Community Punishment. It is just the jail sentence that is crazily inappropriate.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

For a start, the shock value of a prison sentence would probably have the same effect on this woman and on others who hear about the case if the term was (say) seven days instead of six months. Locking her up for 6 months (I assume 3 months with remission) looks grossly disproportionate to me - vindictive is the other way I would describe it.

I don't condone or excuse the lie but I do understand it. She was wrong - seriously wrong - but does she deserve a six months jail term? Absolutely not.

With regard to the "triviality" of the offence, you might like to re-read my post on the other thread. If speeding is so dangerous as to constitute a "serious criminal offence": (a) why aren't there more crashes (after all, it's happening ~10 million times a day); (b) why do the authorities allow speeders to continue on their way after this serious offence is detected? The answer is, of course, that the state is arguing both ends of the argument.

BTW, you haven't posted any response on the other thread. I hope that means it's got you thinking.

p.s.

Suppose you were on 9 points and received another NIP from a Gatso. Suppose your wife offered to accept the penalty instead of you. Are you SURE you would refuse to let her do so, in the almsot certain knowledge that you would face a 6 months ban and possibly loss of job?

How does that gel with my post of 10:29 in this thread?

What if international law declares the entire procedure to be a violation of human rights later this year?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Agreed.

Observer: Agreed, in general.



No you are right I haven't, thank you for pointing that out. I hope you thought about my post as much as you hope I'm thinking about yours...



What if it doesn't.....?

Yes, she shouldn't have lied and yes she could have expected more than the £60/3 points penalty. Larger fine and maybe community service. But compared to other offences - 6 months in jail???

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Why can't we just use Common Sense?

To be honest, I did wrestle with the points you raised, but not because of your post. I did my thinking about them quite a long time ago and it was the conclusions I drew that led me to construct the 'essay' I reposted on your thread.

On this topic, another question you should ask yourself is why a defendant found guilty of (say) theft, who has protested his innocence in the witness box, is not subsequently charged with (and punished for) perjury. After all, if he was found guilty of theft on the basis of objective evidence then, by definition, he must have lied on oath (perjury) in an attempt to escape the consequences. (Perjury is a more serious offence than attempting to pervert, the latter not having the component of lying on oath.)

The answer is that the punishment for the offence (that is higher because of a not guilty plea than it would be with a guilty plea), in accordance with generally accepted jurisprudence, is seen as sufficent punishment in itself.

In this case, the woman attempted to pervert but did not, in fact, succeed. She was identified from the photo. Applying the same principle that is applied in other criminal cases, it is arguable that she should have simply been convicted of speeding, but with a harsher (perhaps maximum) penalty.

As I said before, the punishment meted out appears to me as mean-spirited vindictiveness - "we'll teach you a lesson you won't forget for daring to challenge our abuse of your human rights".

p.s.

Any response to this?

Suppose you were on 9 points and received another NIP from a Gatso. Suppose your wife offered to accept the penalty instead of you. Are you SURE you would refuse to let her do so, in the almsot certain knowledge that you would face a 6 months ban and possibly loss of job?

Nice quip.

My point really is that the rightness and wrongness is far from cut and dried. My personal opinion is that the law in this area is a serious violation of our human rights, and I'm bound to judge such cases from that perspective.

It's also 'quite likely' that the law will fail later this year in the ECHR, and I think that puts the state on very weak ground in this particular case. Suppose she's still banged up when the law that 'caused' her behaviour and conviction fails?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Was she? Not in the sense of legal proof of identity, I'll wager.

More likely: "You might as well confess, we have you on film."

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

There is no reason in law why a driver cannot be identified from a speed measurement device photo or video. It's just not usually done.

I think there's a reason in law... There's room for a reasonable doubt. Imagine a case where the ONLY evidence of identity is a photo. Could a court rightly convict? I doubt it.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I'm not actually contesting the assertions that she was dealt with in a heavy handed manner.



The reason I took so long to answer, and was in fact in the process of doing so when I opened another window and spotted this thread, was that I was trying to decide whether your response actually addressed the question or a subtly different one. My question was, 'can the majority be wrong', IMHO your answer turned it around to 'is it right to prosecute?' I see a difference there although I accept others may not agree.



You ask a question that poses a moral dillema to which, an answer in the affirmative, will attract a measure of disbelief.However, rather than saying 'yes I would' and then dogmatically refusing to change my stance, I offer this.
To answer that question I would have to juxtapose myself with someone who is in a situation that I am not, nor am likely to be. The fact that others might believe this not to be true doesn't alter my way of viewing this.
Thus, I am not nor do I envisage myself ever to be someone who has gotten themselves into a position of being on 9 points
I am not currently someone who would lose their job if subsequently banned
Thus, I abstain until I find myself with such a decision to make.

However, with regards to the above, I offer my response to this:



I do not. My whole life and career has demanded that I face up to the consequences of my actions, under pressure, regardless of the potential outcome to myself. If I failed to do this then, without wishing to overdramatise, people might die - its as simple as that.
One of my own greatest sadnesses about todays society is that people see lying and cheating as the answer to avoiding having to face up to ones responsibilities. Consciences appear not to be affected or even come in to play.
Bang someones car door, nobody looking then just leg it.
Ran over someones bike, deny all knowledge and demand the accuser prove it.
Get caught speeding, lie in the hope of getting off.
Those aren't reasonable actions, it is the behaviour of lying, cheating deceitful people. Are these the sort of individuals we want working with our bank accounts, tending our health or whatever?

Last year I broke the rear window of my neighbours daughters car with a stone that flew out from my mower. I informed them that it was me (there was nobody around at the time), and paid for a replacement. My neighbour was gobsmacked, the previous occumpant of the house would have just denied all knowledge and/or demand that they prove it was him

A photo or video is evidence. Whether it's sufficient to prove a fact (identity of offender or offence or whatever) beyond reasonable doubt is up to the court to decide (subject to statutory rules, if applicable). Doesn't make any difference whether the offence is speeding, theft, rape or murder. There's no statutory rule that a photo is not capable of constituting sufficient evidence of identity of an offender in a speeding case so it must be possible for it to do so.

Neatly dodged (I thought you would) but I don't need to press you for an answer. The question simply demonstrates that morality is not absolute. As discussed in the other thread, it must be considered in the real world context.

I'll answer your response on 'can the majority be wrong' on the other thread.

Agreed. But I still strongly doubt that a court could properly convict. I've always put reasonable doubt in the range of >10,000:1. Out of a population of 10,000 you would find many hundreds of dopplegangers.

And of course a smart lawyer can frequently keep his client out of court completely, thus denying the court the opportunity to make a comparison.

No. In all normal circumstances photo identity is used in practice to extract a confession, not to convict. Clearly the lesson for nurses and others everywhere is 'don't confess'.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I did assume the question was a rhetorical one . Its easy to prove a point by deploying a extreme axample, many people fail when faced with even a small moral dillema

Ah, but it's note really an extreme example is it (although you may consider it to be in your case). With ~1.7M camera detected speeding offences a year being dealt with (2003 figures), it's a dilemma that is probably being faced by many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people right now.

This is one of the insidious side-effects of camera enforcement. It will tend to draw normally law-abiding people into committing a far more serious offence than that which the system seeks to deter. And the truly perverse fact is - the system (at a system level, not the individual level) doesn't really care about that or take any notice of it. Unless the photo evidence is clearly able to reveal a false identification (male/female distinction, for example), which most of the time it isn't, the system is far more interested in securing an admission of guilt from any Tom, Dick or Harry than securing the prosecution of the actual offender.

The ECHR demands that the punishment is proportional to the crime. How this is defined is not stated, but 6 months for this offence seems way over the top to me, and I am a bit of a 'Hanger and Flogger' when it comes to 'real' crime. You have only to look at sentences handed out to reckless drivers who kill and maim to see the monstrosity of this sentence.

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Good manners maketh a good motorist

Yes, it doesn't stack up with 15 months for Naseem Hamid driving like a nutter and breaking every major bone in a bloke's body, does it?

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed