JAIL.
YOU'RE AT HIGH risk of jail.
And you have to work overtime to avoid it.
As far as the courts are concerned, they have little sympathy for people who drive without insurance in the first place.
They have even less for people who drive after being disqualified.
There’s a pretty logical reason for this.
If you’ve been disqualified from driving by a Judge and you decide to drive anyway, that’s seen as you giving two-fingers to the courts.
"As a general rule, it is not wise
to antagonise people who can put you in jail"
Judges tend not to like that sort of stuff.
That’s why they often put people someplace where they can be sure they won’t drive anymore.
I think you know what I’m talking about.
In other words, it means you don’t care what penalty they give you, you’re going to drive anyway.
Now this may not be true in your case but that’s what they think and it’s up to you to convince them otherwise.
Other pressures on the judiciary cause them to take a firm line on driving while disqualified.
The most frequent criticism is something along these lines:
“the rest of us have to pay for insurance and we have to pay more every time people like you drive without insurance, has a crash, and the other driver has to make a claim. We have to pay for that, have to pay for you”.
If you’re hearing some variation of this, then jail is looming.
If you hear a judge say to your lawyer, “address me on why I shouldn’t jail your client” you’ll notice that the prison officers in court are now looking right at you.
Is there a defence to driving while disqualified?
No.
There is no defence to driving while disqualified.
Sometimes people raise the flimsy possibility of trying to impress the Judge based on some sort of “emergency”.
The idea is usually along the lines that they “had” to drive because of some unforeseen and sudden crisis.
Judges are extremely skeptical of this because the chances of a genuine emergency taking place at the one time that you get caught driving without insurance are extremely rare.
It almost never happens.
In other words, in my 27 years in the criminal justice system on both the prosecution and defence side, I’ve never heard of it happening.
And it invites 'unwelcome' scrutiny.
For one thing the Judge would obviously wonder why you were in close proximity to a car considering that you were disqualified.
You’re disqualified after all, why do you still even possess a car?
You can see how that just wouldn’t fly in court. After all, running spurious defences that assume the Judge will accept “any old story” (they will not) runs the risk of angering them.
It's an insult to their intelligence, that someone like you thinks they're stupid enough to fall for that.
And that makes them cross.
As a general rule, it is not wise to antagonise people who can put you in jail.
What is the sentence for driving while disqualified?
A fine of up to €5,000 and/or 6 months in prison.
Either or both.
In practice the chances of you getting a fine even remotely close to €5,000 are low.
After all, the people who continually drive while uninsured tend not to have very much money. So, fining them €5,000 or even €1,000 is pointless.
But jail is very much a real possibility.
"It's an insult to their intelligence,
that someone like you thinks
they're stupid enough to fall for that.
And that makes them cross"
Often, what Judges do is to impose the prison sentence and a fine of between €400 to €1,000. These are general parameters only.
It may be higher, it may be lower, but it’s usually in that bracket.
You might wonder why that financial penalty is so low.
Its low because the Judge knows that if it is too high, the person will very likely appeal the “severity” of the financial penalty, which takes up more time in another court.
But the real danger is the risk of jail.
If you do get a sentence of imprisonment, you have a right to appeal that sentence to the Circuit Court.
That’s the higher court and the appeal will be in front of a different Judge.
BUT A WORD OF WARNING here too: there is a growing army of Circuit Court Judges who take an even harder line on driving without insurance and driving while disqualification.
And the thing with an appeal court is that while they have the power to reduce the sentence, they also have the power to increase it.
I remember an old Appeal Judge from the Midlands.
He was a slight man with neat, combed white hair.
Impossibly polite and very mild mannered.
When he spoke it was in a whisper, so that you almost had to lean forward to hear what he said.
One day he came out to his bench and said:
“Anyone who’s appealing a driving while disqualified conviction had better consider their position”.
As he said it a smile crept across his face.
Then he sat down.
That was a signal, a very clear signal, that if you decided to pursue your driving while disqualified appeal, unpleasant consequences might result.
The prison vans were full as they drove away from the court that day.
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