Are they legal?
IN THEORY A person can be banned for life.
The law does allow it.
In practice though, lifetime bans are rarely upheld.
This can be the case even where fatalities occur.
As in everything else in life, context is key.
But why?
If someone drinks and drives and a death occurs, surely the court would be entitled to order their disqualification for life?
After all, it’s not as if the courts have not upheld lifetime bans in the past.
They have.
"In other words, once someone pays their debt to society, in theory they should be ‘readmitted’ back into civilised society again to hopefully begin a productive life.
A lifetime ban destroys this possibility"
In People v Walsh [2017] the court decided that “the public interest may require short, lengthy or even lifetime disqualifications”.
So, they can be deployed.
But in Walsh the court wasn’t really concerned with the sole issue of lifetime bans.
In practice the higher courts have not been inclined to order lifetime bans.
This is because they view such bans as being so draconian, so harsh, that the punishment that a court could impose would ‘never end’.
In other words, the penalty of disqualification would last for the entirety of the motorist’s life.
The role of any court penalty is to mark the seriousness of the wrongdoing and to punish offenders.
But it also has a ‘rehabilitative’ aspect.
In other words, once someone pays their debt to society, in theory they should be ‘readmitted’ back into civilised society again to hopefully begin a productive life.
A lifetime ban destroys this possibility.
That’s one of the reasons courts don’t really like them.
THIS IS NOT to say that a person would not be disqualified: they would, but for far shorter periods, like twenty years.
They would also face the possibility of jail.
A recent case before the Court of Appeal sheds some light on lifetime bans.
In that case the court quashed a lifetime ban that had been imposed in 2009.
In this case the motorist had drank and drove and had crashed. A passenger in his car was killed.
When the Circuit Court passed sentence in 2009, they imposed a lifetime ban.
The appeal before the Court of Appeal lifted the lifetime ban.
The court decided that lifetime bans should only be imposed “in exceptional cases, usually involving repeat offending, which did not arise in this case”.
The lifetime ban was lifted and replaced with a 20-year ban instead.
But the court made an interesting observation.
"In practice the higher courts have not been inclined
to order lifetime bans.
This is because they view such bans as being
so draconian, so harsh, that the punishment
that a court could impose would ‘never end’"
As the appeal was being heard 16 years after the lifetime ban was imposed, they didn’t feel that it was appropriate to impose a jail sentence at that stage. To do so would “simply be unjust”.
But Judge Tara Burns issued a warning.
She said that if the appeal had been heard relatively soon after the lifetime ban had been imposed, a jail sentence would have been “all but inevitable”.
Lifetime bans can be imposed but in truth rarely are.
As David Staunton writes, “[without] some ‘unusual circumstance’ a disqualification for life is wrong in principle”.
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