A SICK EXCUSE

It seems your friendly neighbourhood doctor is the latest way to try to beat a charge of driving under the influence of drink or drugs. Although maybe it’s not so new.  A refreshingly honest magistrate has knocked back a series of drink driving excuses on the grounds that doctors are too willing to provide medical excuses for repeat offenders.

Magistrate Rodney Crisp obviously was sick of a litany of doctors’ excuse forms when he said yesterday ‘Most medical practitioners will give you the all clear anyway. We can’t rely on them any more. Never could’.

It’s not that many years ago when the use of an analytical chemist was a surefire way to beat a drink-driving rap. It was dishonest but heaps of people  conned the courts and got away with it.

I know people who did it. And the courts bought it. For the chemists it became a lucrative business. It worked like this. You got pinged for drink driving. You paid a chemist a couple of hundred bucks and your replicated events leading up to your arrest.

You told the chemist how many drinks you’d had over several hours and what food you had consumed. Of course, in the replay, you said you’d had four standard beers over three hours and along the way you had eaten a bowl of soup, two breads rolls and a steak and kidney pie. And you’d swear to that.

Even though you had actually had eight beers and the closest thing you had come to a meal was a shared packet of Smith’s crisps.  The chemist’s report showed you couldn’t possibly have been over .05 and it must have been some mechanical or bloodstream error.  The chemist, in his white coat, signed off on it and for a while the courts bought it. It was the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card.

Getting back to crisps… the Magistrate not the potato variety. Magistrate Crisp knocked back case after case for licence reinstatement. And for good reason.  One man tried to get his licence back despite five prior convictions. A woman applied to have an interlocker device removed from her car even though she had tried to drive her car seven times while under the influence.

People with these records should be banned from driving for ten years for a second offence. And banned for life after that.

Friday, August 21, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009