MOTORISTS CAN no longer rely on telling a judge they didn’t get a fixed penalty notice for speeding in the post as a way to avoid extra penalty points and a higher fine in court, Dundalk Circuit Court was told yesterday.
Thousands of motorists have told District Court judges they did not get the penalty notice in the post and therefore did not have the chance to pay the lower fine and incur fewer penalty points. In some cases judges have struck out the summonses while other motorists have been given a chance to pay the fixed penalty notice fine.
In yesterday’s case, judge Michael White ruled that proof of posting of the notice, as distinct from proof of receipt, was sufficient for the courts. He said he had dealt with “a lot of appeals” from the district court and had decided to “deal with the irregularities”.
He found that “the non-receipt of a fixed penalty notice is not an automatic bar to the judge proceeding with the trial.
“If the essential proofs required for the offence are established the trial judge can convict.”
He said it was clear that the effect of serving someone with a fixed penalty notice “is to postpone a prosecution for a specific period of time to allow the fixed penalty to be paid and if it is so paid no prosecution will follow.”
“The fact that penalty points increase when a court conviction arises is not of itself a bar to conviction,” he added.
Barrister Lily Buckley told the judge his ruling was “breaking new ground and will have ramifications all over the country”. She said a motorist who did not receive the notice was “prejudiced and is treated differently to other persons who did receive the fixed penalty notice”. She was representing a motorist who, the court was told, was detected doing 165km/h on the M1 where the speed limit is 120km/h. He was appealing his fine and disqualification and said he did not receive the letter from the fixed charge processing office.
Ms Buckley said that in the Dublin district courts when the presumption that a person had received the fixed penalty notice was called into question, the prosecution did not object to the case being adjourned. The judgment by Judge White was, she said, “a change in the position”.