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Below are the posts made before 1st March, 2007. These have been summarised in the discussion areas, but you can read them in full if you’d prefer.

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Traffic Offences

Posted by LincolnMan on 06/02/2007 - 19:48

In particular I refer to the Road Traffic Act, and the law round speeding offences.

There are many points about his are of law that makes this 'bad' law. There are three points in particular that ought to be rectified, in order to make the law just.

1. The requirement of S172 that forces the completion of the Notice of Intended prosecution.This is currently under consideration in the ECHR, but no matter what happens, it is clearly unfair that a driver is effectively forced to confess to a speeding offence, with out a proper caution under PACE, or prosecuted for failing to confess. There needs to be a different method of prosecuting speeding offenders that doesn't use this brutal approach.

2. The provision that the word of two Police officers alone, with no corroborating evidence, can be used to convict someone of speeding. If one reads various online forums o nthis issue, its clear that the Police abuse this provision, and cause considerable damage to the reputation of the police in the process. It is entirely unreasonable to allow conspiracy such as this, when there are perfectly usable devices to measure speed. The law needs changing such that the officers opinion is irrelevant, thus eliminating human error and fraud, and the only evidence allowable be electronic, which is harder to dispute.

3. The use of the equipment. Much is made of the ACPO guild lines regarding the use of speedmeters, but to avoid variations between Forces, and to standardise prosecutions, the ACPO Guidlines shoudl be reviewed by an independant body made of Police Officers, Manufacturers of equipment, independent experts and lay persons, and then made law.

There are many other issues that need addressing as well, such the charging of £10 for copies of the evidence (practised by many forces), the reluctance of Forces to release complete video session footage (this should be an absolute right), the use of threatening and aggressively worded letters by the police to intimidate alleged offenders into caving in rather than defending in court, and a public review by an independently formed body into the effectiveness of Speed Cameras.