how to go about

Winning your trial

Because no driving is involved all the police have to do is prove that you were in charge of the vehicle while you were either unfit to drive or over the drink driving limit. That actually makes defending you easier. Here’s how we can go about it.

First, we look to see whether the police had the power to require you to provide in the first place. The police cannot simply demand specimens from anybody the like, they must be involved in a genuine investigation into an offence. If there is no reason to suspect you may have committed an offence, then it is likely that the requirement to provide will be unlawful and should therefore be excluded from evidence.

Once the police have established that they did have a power to require the specimen from you we can then look at whether they conducted the procedure to take that specimen properly. Where the specimen is of blood or urine we will also look at the handling of that specimen in the period between it being taken from you and it being tested at the police laboratory. This is called the chain of custody or continuity evidence. Often the continuity evidence will show breaks in the chain of custody that lead to valid concerns about what happened to the specimen in that period, e.g. was it stored properly etc, and even whether it is the same specimen or not. If the prosecution cannot show an unbroken chain of custody then it will raise concerns about the reliability of the evidence that you were over the limit. Once the specimen makes it to the prosecution lab there are a whole raft of things that can go wrong. Our panel of independent experts can examine the prosecution evidence and assess how reliable the prosecutions testing procedures were and thus whether the court should accept their results.

Leaving aside the potential for technical faults with the prosecution case, we should look at the “statutory defence”. There is a defence to being drunk in charge if there was no likelihood of your driving while you remained over the drink driving limit. There are a lot of factors to consider but broadly speaking if you can show you would not have driven the vehicle then yWhen the police cannot prove that you drove while drunk they may instead decide to charge you with being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle. A conviction will result in either a driving ban or 10 penalty points, which may cause you to tot up to 12 or more points and be disqualified for at least six-months.ou will be acquitted. You can find examples of this sort of defence in the past cases section at the bottom of the page.

How It Works

The court will look at the starting point relevant to your alcohol level then consider anything that makes the offence more serious and any mitigation put forward by your solicitor to decide whether to move up or down the range available to them. In extreme cases, the judge may move outside of the sentencing range altogether.

You will usually receive a discount on the sentence for pleading guilty although that does not apply to the driving ban and the court cannot impose less than 10 points even if you do plead guilty. This often means that in practice there is little to be gained from a guilty plea except for a slight reduction in the fine. That said, if the court thinks you are on the cusp of an immediate ban or penalty points, a guilty plea may convince them to come down on the side of points rather than a ban. This is a difficult balancing exercise and you should call us on 020 8242 4440 to discuss your options.