104 on the motorway.

  • Thread starter Thread starter DM
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DiamondMark said:
Im finding it hard to see how anyone can take offence at gemologist for a job title
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That sounds quite interesting actually, not a job title that comes up every day that's for sure.

Enjoy your 6 weeks then I suppose, I guess all you can really do is make the best of it. It's not really 'that' long anyway in the grand scheme of things.
 
This is what happens when people make judgements based on their interpretations of the law - there is no consistency.

Sounds like there was nothing you could have done to change the outcome, short of openly hitting on the magistrates. Actually that might have improved things.

Perhaps this is how magistrates unconsciously balance the sentences they deal out. For every 3 scrotes they let off due to them not owning the shirt on their backs, they throw the book at people like yourself that they feel can afford to take it.

Either way enjoy your holiday.
 
MrLOL said:
Blatently the magistrates have made a character judgement on you, and gone to town on you. No idea why they decided they didnt like you, and it would be wrong of me to try and guess as i dont know you either, but whichever way you cut it, my £70 fine + £30 costs + £15 victim surcharge and 28 day for doing 107 makes your punishment seem stupid and outrageous.

My commiseration's.
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It's more like the fact it's means tested. Would you have been able to comfortably pay a £2,000 fine? Would DiamondMark have batted an eyelid at a £70 fine?
 
Considering you couldn't have got it much worse you should have done one of these when your were leaving :p

Removed. Tony does use some choice language.
 
Howard said:
It's more like the fact it's means tested. Would you have been able to comfortably pay a £2,000 fine? Would DiamondMark have batted an eyelid at a £70 fine?
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it is means tested, but mark's fine is over 20 x the size of mine. I dont know how much he earns, but for it to be comparable he'd have be earning well over £500,000 a year.

If he does earn that sort of money then fair enough the fine is appropriate given his wage, but we dont know.
 
Isn't it done on Disposable income? So you got a tiny fine because you had no disposable left as you spent it all on a car, house, premium economy airline tickets etc :p
 
They do take that into account, but i got a fine because the magistrate was lenient on me. Hence the 28 day ban as opposed to 42 days that mark got.

I have £500 + a month spare after my bills etc.. so they could easily have fined me more.
 
MrLOL said:
They do take that into account, but i got a fine because the magistrate was lenient on me. Hence the 28 day ban as opposed to 42 days that mark got.

I have £500 + a month spare after my bills etc.. so they could easily have fined me more.
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Why don't you and Mr Ratner go back and appeal your punishments - see what happens? :D
 
[TW]Fox;17221908 said:
Isn't it done on Disposable income? So you got a tiny fine because you had no disposable left as you spent it all on a car, house, premium economy airline tickets etc :p
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IIRC it's a combination of income (taking into account the basics such as rent etc), and how serious the case is.
I don't think they take into account discretionary spending such as your Sky/ISP/Car rental (or HP), although they may take that into account in regards to how long you have to pay it back.
From memory the offences have different bands which set how much of the weekly income can be fined (so at the low end of the scale it'll be 1x, at the mid range it might be 2-4x, and at the high end 4-8x or something similar).

So the fine is worked out based on the offence charged, which leads to the band of fine, then any mitigating circumstances etc which might drop it down.

I've no idea what the op earns, but my guess is he got hit hard because his income was high enough that the fine was in proportion based on the band of the offence, and that he probably didn't plead guilty* but instead took the lawyer in (in which case the magistrates might have considered if he could afford an expensive lawyer, and an expensive car the upper area of the fine band would be appropriate).

I hate to say it, but Magistrates work under very strict guidelines for what the sentences they can impose, and have a very experienced clerk of the court there to make sure they don't screw up.

As I understand it, if you're caught bang to rights, it's best to plead guilty as it gets a big "discount" on the sentence because it saves the court/police etc a lot of time and money.


However 2k is silly money for a fine, and I think most magistrates actually consider the victim surcharge a bad joke by the previous government (I've heard of some magistrates lowering a fine by the amount of the surcharge in cases where they thought the VS was disproportionate to the actual fine).


*I can't see if he said he did or not (if not why take a lawyer?)
 
It was a guilty plea and i took a solicitor because i thought he would make a better job of putting my mitigation across than i would.
 
I was done in 2006 for 100mph on an empty motorway, 10am on Sunday in Cumbria there was nothing there, good weather. Caught from 1km away at the limit of the range of the LTI20.20 laser.

I got £150 fine and 5 points, no ban.

My 'true feeling' was 'this is insane, I wasn't doing any harm to anyone' however I was informed that if I tried to give reasons why what I was doing was safe they would throw the book at me and ban me and give me a maximum fine. I feel that one of the main reasons for your high fine was that in your defence you were trying to justify your actions too much.

I believe the reason they were 'kind' to me was because instead of letting them know my feelings about a speed limit introduced as a temporary measure many decades ago, I played the humble card. I said my speeding was naive and that I wasn't going to try to excuse my actions. I said that it had prompted me to change my driving style, that I had enrolled on an IAM driving course to help me further develop defensive driving skills and make rapid progress without speeding etc. Basically if you go humble and give the impression you accept what you did was wrong and stupid they will go easy. I was also in a 'band' below you in terms of their suggested punishments. 91-100 is a band and 101-110 is a band.

I have no doubt that if I had turned up there saying 'but I need my car to drive to lectures at university and shuttle my babes around yo, come on chaps 100mph is totally cool' I'd have been banned and had a big fine awarded.

Also - magistrates are ridic. They don't even need a law degree so it's really a bad situation. There's very little consistency in their punishments.
 
taximike said:
Also - magistrates are ridic. They don't even need a law degree so it's really a bad situation. There's very little consistency in their punishments.
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But they do have a fair bit of training (and are monitored to ensure they don't go outside the training), and always have a qualified legal expert in the court to advise them on points of the law (IIRC the Clerk is often better aware of details of offences handled by the magistrates than many normal lawyers, as he/she comes across them more often).

Any punishments they hand out have to fall within the government guidelines, which are published and available online.

The whole idea of magistrates is that they are more "normal" people than a Judge, representing the local area more closely than a judge would thus more in touch with things locally, and better suited to relatively simple/minor cases (indeed as I understand it some magistrates know more about certain types of cases than some full blown judges as they deal with them much more often).
They don't need to be highly legally qualified, as they aren't expected to make law, but rather decide as part of a group if someone has broken it given the evidence, and then try and find a suitable sentence from within the guidelines.
If they are in doubt or it looks potentially serious enough it gets booted up to a full court with a Judge.

Of course trying to justify why you thought the law didn't/shouldn't apply to you isn't going to go down well (not to the magistrate, or for that matter to a high court judge..), as part of the reason for the fine/points/ban is to try and ensure you don't break it again - if you're busy making excuses for why it was "ok guv", they're liable to make the point a bit harder that the law does apply to you in the hope you'll take better note of it next time.

Rightly or wrongly at least showing the appearance of remorse does tend to affect the sentence, be it from a Magistrate or a Judge.
 
Werewolf said:
as part of the reason for the fine/points/ban is to try and ensure you don't break it again - if you're busy making excuses for why it was "ok guv", they're liable to make the point a bit harder that the law does apply to you in the hope you'll take better note of it next time.

Rightly or wrongly at least showing the appearance of remorse does tend to affect the sentence, be it from a Magistrate or a Judge.
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Do you not think they hear the same

"the car just ran away from me"

"im about to embark on an advanced motoring course"

"my poodle jumped on my foot and made me hit the accelerator"

"my sick nan needs a lift to hospital every tuesday"

**** excuses every day of the week?


I was apologetic, i just pointed out that my offence was not the same as weaving in and out the traffic, in the rain on the M25 in the rush hour, 5 up in a Corsa.

Now if i was a magistrate with 1% of unbiased reasoning brain power, that would annoy me less than the usual **** above that i would hear 5 times daily.
 
they've gone to town on you because they decided they didnt like you.

Its a sad state of affairs that personal opinion based on a snap judgement comes into the equation, but its the only explanation for the severe punishment when compared with mine. The ban length isnt anything to do with your wage, and yours was 50% longer for 3mph less so the argument the magistrates are restricted in what they can and cant do doesnt hold.
 
MrLOL said:
they've gone to town on you because they decided they didnt like you.
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It sounds like this is the case.

You don't get justice in the Magistrates' courts, you get an approximation of justice. Sometimes it will go in your favour, sometimes not.

That said... you must have really ticked off the entire bench somehow. Maybe that should tell you something (or maybe it was your lawyer) :D
 
I think i will have to bow to the majority and accept that a solicitor was a mistake.

My daughter is reading this and has now shouted down it was my pastel pink polo shirt i had on under my jacket :)
 
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