Trials involving motoring offences often follow a
pattern where the defendant especially if unrepresented is blind to the folly
of his/her errors which have necessitated legal intervention. There is no doubt in my mind that if many such
defendants were interrogated more efficiently by the court on their first
appearance many such trials would and should be avoidable such is the confusion
in the layman`s mind between innocence and mitigation.
However such is the variety of human behaviour that from time to time a
matter will come to court which will be head and shoulders more interesting
than the rest.
Sean was Irish in his mid thirties whose hair was
not exactly ginger but could not quite be described as brown. Nevertheless although it was thinning it was
an obvious feature. He faced two motoring
charges allegedly committed on separate occasions
the later one being more serious.
When his case was called on we were told that in both matters identity was the issue
and that for reasons that would later become obvious they would be tried separately.
The prosecution case consisted of the evidence
of the police officer who had conducted
the stop in the first matter. She duly
gave her evidence whereupon defence counsel showed her a picture of an individual and asked her if the man in the dock or the face in the
picture was the person stopped. Without
hesitation she said that the image in the picture had more resemblance to the
stopped driver than the defendant. Sean
was acquitted. There was then some
discussion in the absence of the defendant.
Identity was also to be the defence in the second matter. We were told that the image was of a known
offender who was also known to the defendant. A month or two previously Sean had been charged with a matter involving the same vehicle in another motoring
case at another court but it was withdrawn when it
had been shown that his alibi was watertight and that the known offender whose
image had been taken at the time of that stop was the likely culprit. CPS was granted a short adjournment to call a
reviewing lawyer. Five minutes later we
were told that they would proceed with the case. The defence was essentially the same. The single prosecution witness, the PC who had
made the stop almost a year previously and interviewed the driver at the scene,
was adamant that the defendant and the driver were as one although only a very vague
description had been recorded in her notebook.
That description made no mention of Sean`s hair colour. She seemed to recollect the unusual car
involved more than anything else. (It
was not the vehicle involved in the other cases). There is much written on the issues involved
in a dock I.D. For his part Sean was not quite as credible a witness as one would have expected an innocent party to be. He was sometimes hesitant and some of his
actions were not as consistent as they might have been. However the evidence presented; prosecution
and defence, and taking into account the
earlier acquittal described above and the matter previously withdrawn as our L/A advised was within our remit, was
such that we could not be sure he had committed the offence .
No doubt if he had committed the offence in Scotland
referendum or no referendum he would perhaps have been acquitted on a verdict
of not proven. I understand of course
the wider implications of the third verdict which has no place in any other jurisdiction. Are we better off with simple guilty or not
guilty? Sometimes I hae ma doots.
