SHAME, JUDGE, SHAME

Years ago on television I was doing a top-rating prime time current affairs programme which included a segment called The Shame File.

Myth has blurred what we did, or were trying to do. I was never some moralistic prick who wanted to castigate a person who miscalculated and went under on a .07.

We were targeting the recidivists. Drunken, reckless, drivers with three or six convictions who should never be allowed behind the wheel again. For the sake of other people. Not them.

I went after them with no regrets then and no regrets now. And I have laughed when the editor of the Herald Sun, a talented and shrewd journo named Peter Blunden, boasted to me once that if ever I got picked up over .05 he had the Page One headline ready to roll: Shame, Hinch, Shame. And he would be right.

That is one reason why at weekends, if as usual, I am drinking wine with lunch I leave the car in the garage and always take taxis. Other people should to. It is an insurance policy.

I raise the issue today for a very serious reason. I have a candidate for The Shame File. He is a judge, a County Court judge. And I nominate him for The Shame File NOT because he personally drank and drove but because of the cavalier way he confronted a chronic drunk driver. A driver who should never be behind the wheel of a car again in his lifetime.

The judge is Peter Gebhart. I believe there should be some mechanism to have him sacked. In my opinion his comments in court recently make him unfit to ever sit on a bench on judgment ever again.

Before him a man with one of the worst drink-driving and driving while disqualified records I have ever seen. The man – Ronald James Young – had featured on the HINCH Shame File in the past. Didn’t stop him. And County Court Judge Gebhart was sympathetic.

He virtually said that if he were Ronald James Young and he had been banned for driving for such a long time he would have rebelled and broken the law.

Young’s crimes were so numerous, so dangerous and so blatant that he had been banned from driving for thirty years. He should have been banned (long ago) for life. Consider this:

Young has never held a driver’s licence. Never. Since the mid 60's his convictions include four for unlicensed driving, 14 for driving while disqualified, 12 for exceeding .05, and four for refusing a breath test. Twelve for exceeding .05. Understandably, in 1991 a magistrate disqualified this road menace from driving for thirty years. Two years later he was again before the courts, banned from driving and sentenced to prison.

This week before the sympathetic Judge Gebhart his lawyers claimed Young was a reformed alcoholic, no longer drinks, and a 30-year ban was excessive.

Court sources told me that Judge Gebhart was touched. He reportedly said that if he himself had been given 30 years, he would've continued to drive. He criticised a fellow judge for the previous “excessive punishment” and said it was the “equivalent of a death sentence”. He was right on that. It could have been a death sentence for other innocent drivers and passengers if this irresponsible, drunken, maniac was allowed back behind the wheel.. Judge Gebhart said that no matter the extent of the seriousness of the offences, 30 years could not be justified.

And when Police in court showed dismay at such comments he reportedly said:

"If the informer doesn't like what the court is saying, the informer can leave'. One policeman did leave the courtroom in disgust.

Gebhart reduced the 30-year sentence to 10. Because Young has another separate 25- year sentence, he won't be allowed to drive until 2019. He will.

Think of this: Ronald James Young’s convictions include four for unlicensed driving, 14 for driving while disqualified, 12 for exceeding .05, and four for refusing a breath test. He should never be allowed to sit in the driver’s seat of a car ever again in his life. It might just save somebody else’s.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004