English Law
 

The fundamental principle of English law is that if you break the law and you are caught, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty and the onus of proof of your guilt lies with the prosecution. You are NOT FORCED to admit your guilt. In fact you do not even have to say anything at all and that also means not being forced to snitch on someone.

However if you happen to have been flashed for speeding, then the law changes.

When you do get flashed for speeding the registered owner of the vehicle gets the letter and is obliged to name the driver or take the rap themselves.

Not right is it?

Re: English Law
 

Of course it is right. Any car photographed/stopped speeding has a registered owner, so unless the vehicle has been reported stolen, the owner should have full responsibility.

I am sick and tired of reading of motorists responsible for mayhem and carnage on Britain's roads walking away from court because absolute proof could not be made that they were behind the wheel. At the end of the day, it is their car and they have full responsibility.

If you want to defend this nonsense, then go ahead, Jambutty. But I am on the other side - that of the innocent victims.

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Yes, if you get caught by a speeding camera it should not be viewed as a challenge to get out of it, it should be a hands up 'I've been caught' moment.

I'm with Tealeaf. If the speed limit says 30, 40 or even 70 and you are doing more than that, it is your fault completely if you get caught. If you are not actually driving at that moment then the real driver should own up. If they refuse to own up then sorry, but you should take the rap - it's your car, what are you doing lending it to someone so dishonest?

Re: English Law
 

If it's your vehicle, then it's a morale dilema for you. If the authorities have the evidence that YOUR vehicle was caught speeding, then it's up to you as the owner to either accept the punishment yourself, or inform the police as to who was driving it.

If you'd been charged with a more serious offence, i.e. murder, but knew who had really commited the crime, would you accept the punishment, or would you inform the police?

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I agree with you on that, except too many of the mobile cameras are not being operated correctly so can and do give false reading so people who are not speeding get done.

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Taken from the Highway code penalty table

Failing to identify driver of a vehicle £1,000 Discretionary 3

I suppose if they really wanted to make life difficult, by allowing someone to use your car they could probably make it aiding and abetting, if your vehicle is involved in something illegal. Though that would have frightening consequences for all employers out there that supply company vehicles.

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I hope the camera gets a fine and points too, can't have these cameras thinking they can get away with speeding can we! :D

(sorry jambutty, I couldn't resist I'll get out of your serious thread now)

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Nice one Dr. T.Belle AsBo, its not often we can get one over our Gayle in the old grammer department.

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...although it would be nice to get one over in the old grammar department.

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Hey up T' I didn't know you fancied my old grandma!:p

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I never said I could spell Mr T. I hope you don't mind being called Mr T. its not too personal or anything is it?

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That ones easy, it was Murdoch I always had trouble spelling :D

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Don't worry, working from your posts he'll just think 'spelling mistake', but when I'm calling it him he will probably take offence!
:D

Think we'd better get back on thread.:eek:

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Historians now attribute this to dyslexia. However, his son Murdoch II, who ruled 832 - 865, was known for a prolifigate literary output; thus we can only conclude that his spelling was somewhat superior.

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As always I bow to your knowledge Mr T ......

....... but ... well ... I only meant Mad Murdoch from the A-Team :D

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Is this anything to do with the two bods that are raising a challange in the European courts concerning speed cameras??? Sorry but I think of them as pieces of Health and Safty equipment.

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I've just read the story about 2 men who are taking their fight for not revealing who was driving their car to the European Court of Human Rights.

http://www.channel4.com/news/content/news-storypage.jsp?id=11174185

May i point out that the article doesn't state how fast they were traveling. C4 news stated that one of the drivers was caught traveling at 47 mph in a 30 mph zone.

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Ok now I am worried. If the Europratts find in favour of these two arrogent butt wipes then how many other laws of ours are going to be chalenged.

We are a Soverign State not some add on to to a wider U.S.E. :o Its time to start acting like one and give Brussels the I.S.S.D.

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This is what annoys me. Lots of people are against the European Courts intervening in our everyday life. However, they go running to them when it suits them & UK laws don't work in their favour.

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Succesive govenments have handed that much power to the Europratts that I dont think we will be able to tell them to take a hike. Our laws have been chipped away for years and this motoring carry on shows how bad it is. To jambutty's point about it being English Law the same applies under Scottish Law if in a somewhat different form and the same for Northern Ireland.

While people can go running to the Europratts with their arguments about infringed rights then all laws in the UK might as well be defunct.

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Oh, how true!

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i think if its your vehicle (not been stolen) and its clocked speeding unless you shop the driver, its the owners resposibility cos he let whoever use his car. so on that basis fine the owner. p.s. unless its me.

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I appreciate the point about people complaining about being ruled from Brussels and then running to the European Courts when they don’t like the English laws but that pre-supposes that it is the same people doing the running as well as complaining about Europe. There will be some, of course, but in the main the anti-Europeans are just that, totally.

However unless I have misread some posts the readers are missing the point. That being that a witness to a criminal act is liable to a fine if they do not give evidence against the criminal or they can choose to admit to the crime and take the rap. In this case the crime being that a driver of your car exceeded the speed limit.

Maybe my opening post wasn’t clear enough?

Now entrenched in ‘Motoring Law’ it establishes a precedent and could be enshrined in criminal law in the future.

Let’s just recap on what happens. You lend your car to someone and they get flashed for exceeding the speed limit. Although I understand that there are some cameras that can see and photograph the face of the driver, in the main the only evidence is the vehicle number plate, the model and make of vehicle and the time and place. You, as the registered owner, get ‘that’ letter. You have a choice, take the rap yourself or snitch on the driver. If you don’t want to do either you can get fined up to £1,000 and also get 3 points on your license.

Now apply that same principle to other criminal activities. You witness a crime but the criminal threatens your life if you snitch before running off. The police suspect that you witnessed the crime and you are told to testify or face a fine. Now I know that is not exactly the same but the principle still holds good.

I accept that in theory it is every person’s duty to report a crime when they see it being perpetrated but it is not an enforced duty. It is purely voluntary. There is nothing in English Law that states you MUST report a crime and MUST give evidence against the criminal if you witness a crime and subsequently you cannot be fined or imprisoned for not doing so.

Then, as someone has already mentioned there could be a moral dilemma.

You already have 9 points on your license and you lend your car to your son or daughter because his/her car is in the garage for its regular service and MOT, so that s/he can go to work some 40 miles away. Let’s just stick with daughter – it’s less complicated.

Your daughter also has 9 points on her license and part of the journey to and from work is a nice long country road that has a 50 mph speed limit on it. If your daughter sticks to the speed limit it frustrates some of the other drivers behind and they start to take chances in overtaking. So she goes with the flow, which to me is the sensible thing to do if good driving conditions prevail.

The local police know that on any day they can get plenty of drivers for speeding on that stretch of road set up a mobile camera and sure enough she and the rest get clocked.

If she takes the rap she loses her license and unless she can get a lift the job has to go as well. So your dilemma is – do you take the rap and lose your license or do your shop your daughter and she suffers the ensuing consequences. That’s a rhetorical question and I do not expect anyone to answer it. I know one thing, I wouldn’t like to be faced with that dilemma.

The point I am making it is unfair to put people into that situation and to do so hammers yet another nail into the civil liberties coffin.

During the five years that I have lived in my present flat the police have knocked on my door on four occasions to ask if I saw or heard anything happening at the school across the road from me or during an incident outside our block. On each occasion I hadn’t because my living/sitting room is at the back and with the TV or radio on I am not aware of anything happening on the road out front. However on each occasion I could see from the copper’s face that my denial was met with mistrust. Indeed on one notable occasion the cop hinted very strongly that I should have heard or seen something.

If those two motorists at the European Court lose their case then it is a definite possibility that some time in the future we could be forced to give evidence or risk being fined for not doing so. And this raises another point. No one but me KNOWS what I saw or heard. The best that they can do is assume that I might have seen or heard something. So to fine me for not giving evidence they would have to prove that I had that information. But that ‘motoring law’ allows a person to be fined on an assumption not evidence and that drives a coach and horses through English Law.

Let me just put another scenario forward. You lend your car to your son and daughter in law, both of whom are qualified drivers but their car is not available to them. Your daughter in law is driving as you wave them off to collect her mother from the airport. During the journey they get flashed by a speed camera. You have no idea who was driving at the time of the incident because either of them could have been driving. You truthfully state that you do not know who was driving and your son and daughter in law say, “it wasn’t me, it was him/her.” Not having any evidence that a particular person was driving you get the fine because you didn’t say who was driving.

Fair???

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I'm going to take a case to the European Courts, to find out why bloody MPs from Scotland can particpate and vote for legislation that only affects England and Wales.

Hope this post isn't seen as racist to our friends north of the border.:D

Re: English Law
 

How do you suggest the Police enforce the speed limits then?
I get the impression from your posts that you are against cameras and think they affect our civil liberties.

Re: English Law
 

Fair play, i understand your point a little more clearly now. Two points spring to mind though.

1. Your son and daughter need to tell the truth, as to who was driving.

2. We get the German style camera's that take a photo of the driver as the vehicle approaches the speed trap.

The German camera's are much better, but who would fund such a project to replace all the existing camera's? The answer to that one is ....... The motorist will by paying bigger fines.

Re: English Law
 

Fixed sites get the rear of the vehicle, mobile laser type do take a picture of the front including the driver.

Why don't motorbikes have front number plates?

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Most of the German speeding tickets have always had a picture of the driver on them.

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Quote:

How do you suggest the Police enforce the speed limits then?

It would take a greater brain than mine to solve that one Neil. Some people have argued in the past that if we had more traffic police on the roads it would deter most drivers and they would stick to the speed limits. And it does. It is like Blackpool illuminations when someone spots a police car some way in front. They can’t slow down fast enough. But what happens when a speed cop sees someone exceeding the speed limit? On come the blues and twos and he chases the guy and pulls him over. Then whilst he is busy writing out a ticket all the rest take the opportunity to put their collective feet down and are off into the distance.

But let me ask, how would you enforce the mugging law or the burglary law or any of the thousands of laws in existence? Surely the answer has to be to make the punishment harsh enough to deter people from breaking the laws in the first place. But that in itself is a can of worms I don’t care to open at this time.

I’m not against speed cameras Neil, in fact I’m all for them if they stop people from speeding.

What I am against is this law that forces people to give evidence under pain of punishment if they don’t.

For over 300 years it has been enshrined in our law that a person can only be convicted on the evidence produced. The way that certain evidence is gathered like phone taps is not acceptable evidence in a British Court. If the police cannot get the evidence they should not try and force people to give evidence to help their cause under pain of punishment if they don’t.

It was only yesterday on the news that it was alleged that even the police have used the “I don’t know who was driving” excuse to protect a fellow officer and the cases were dropped. If we are to have a law let it apply equally to all.

However also on the news yesterday was one chief constable who prosecuted himself for not revealing the name of a speeding police driver. It’s a crazy world!

I agree that the son and daughter need to tell the truth but in the real world when someone is accused of doing something what is the usual response? Not me?

Much obliged for the German camera info AccyJay – I only knew of their existence and not where they came from. If we had to have those types of camera what’s the chances of drivers shielding their face somehow. You could wear a full face crash helmet.
Magistrate – Why were you wearing a crash helmet whilst driving your car?
Prisoner – To protect my head in case of an accident your worship.
You can’t argue with that no matter what you might think. Don’t forget it is the body that is strapped in and the head is free to bang around at will.

Does the German camera flash a bright light to illuminate the car and driver? If it does it would need to be at head height to see the driver’s head and if it is at head height and it does flash the flash could blind the driver and cause an accident. If it is set at the same height as normal speed cameras driving with the sun visor down would prevent it from capturing your face.

Quote:

Why don't motorbikes have front number plates?

Good question, they used to. Was it something to do with when hitting pedestrians they were getting badly injured on what to all intents and purposes is a knife over the front wheel?

Re: English Law
 

It's not the same as being an independant witness to a crime. If it's your car it's your responsibility and who you lend it to is your responsibility just as it would be if you owned a rifle or something and lent it to somebody to do a spot of rabbit shooting and they used it to hold up a bank. Yep,pretty scary to have to face up to the fact that the person you lent it to broke the law but maybe it would make you think twice about lending things or at least who you lend them to.

I've got a personal axe to grind about drivers who claim "it wasn't me" because several years ago as my late husband and a friend were going down Oxford St and across to ASDA a speeding loony came careering along Hyndburn Rd and smashed into our car. Our friend got the registration number as it sped off and they reported it to the police. Both hubby and friend and several witnesses said they saw a man driving the car.

When the police traced the car and got to the house the owner was on the wrong side of several cans of lager and a bottle of vodka. He swore he'd never been out in the car and his wife said she'd been driving. Despite the fact that everyone saw a man! Of course she was sober and he was drunk so it was easier for he to claim that she panicked and was full of remorse than for him to admit he'd been driving whilst severl times over the limit.

No way to prove anything of course so he got away with drink driving and probably went on to do it again. :mad:

Re: English Law
 

I haven't got a clue how they work, i just know that they do. Sorry

Re: English Law
 

The problem with your argument Jambutty is that in this instance you are not reporting a crime. You are establishing your guilt or innocence - the crime has already been reported by the camera.

You can either accept that you are guilty (i.e. by taking the rap whether it was you who were speeding or not) or prove that you are innocent by stating who is guilty.

Re: English Law
 

You’ve got it on one Gayle. The crime may have been reported but not the criminal who perpetrated the crime. Forcing a person to give evidence is unfair and wrong.

In any case in English Law I do not have to establish my innocence, it is up to the prosecution to establish my guilt. That law has been around for over 300 years.

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I think I will get someone to dresss up as a Pantomime horse with me to hold up a bank.

They maybe able to charge the horse with the crime, if we are caught, but we'll be fine as they won't be able to prove who was at the front of the horse holding the gun, and who was the horses arse.:D

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Just say it was chav, we will all back you up that he is a ass :D

Re: English Law
 

jambutty, you stated

There is nothing in English Law that states you MUST report a crime and MUST give evidence against the criminal if you witness a crime and subsequently you cannot be fined or imprisoned for not doing so.

But there are laws in place such as "witholding information" and "failing to report a crime" that , if the Police or CPS decided to charge the owner of the vehicle would stand up in court, if you feel that motorists are being discriminated , that may be the case but these laws exist.

What about a scenario where an employee is driving a company pool car and an accident occurs and the driver simply drives away, if the Police make enquires and the employer refuses to name the person driving that vehicle, I would imagine they would come down on them pretty hard.

I do understand the pressure the car owner is under when its a friend or family member involved and I would just take it on the chin myself.. but to say its a special law just aimed at motorists in not the case.

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Not many people are gonna admit to being the horses arse.. so just say you were the head and take the rap.

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There is a simple answer to that one. If you don't have what it takes to shop whoever could be driving your car, then don't lend it to anybody.

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It should face forwards like a car plate so the cameras can see it.

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The person who was driving the car deserved to be shopped to the cops because they show you no respect in the first place by speeding whilst driving your car.

If that fails then you take the rap and make sure you get your money back and let them know they are now your number 1 taxi firm!!

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Before a charge of withholding information can be made to stick Mancie the prosecution have to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that you have that information to withhold. The same applies to failing to report a crime. Now unless a cop or anyone else saw you witnessing a crime there is no case to answer. Suspecting that you have information that may aid a prosecution is not enough. But then if a cop or others saw the crime being committed why would they want you?

However the motoring laws on this issue were changed some time back in an attempt to close a loophole with regard to motorists being flashed by speed cameras. So that law was changed just for motorists.
That would be just as bad as number plate placed fore and aft if it came into contact with soft tissue. When I got a fairing for my old Triumph Thunderbird I was entitled to remove the number plate over the front mudguard but I had to have the registration number displayed on the fairing. Today motorbikes and scooters do not need to display a number plate at the front even though most scooters have a flat front facing surface that could accommodate a number plate.

I’m not too sure if this is enshrined in the law but the consensus seems to be that a camera will not flash unless the car is travelling at 10% plus 2 mph above the limit. This is to avoid costly arguments in court about the accuracy of speedometers in vehicles. Even brand new cars can have a speedo that isn’t as accurate as could be expected. The thickness of the needle and the marking on the meter plus parallax error can make a reading by the driver inaccurate. Thus in a 30 mph zone you will not get flashed until you exceed 35 mph. 46 mph in a 40 mph zone up to 79mph in a 70 mph zone. However I wouldn’t rely on that premise.

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Yes there might be damage to a body or more likely a head hitting the mudguard WillowTheWisp but the mudguard, although made from steel, didn’t have any sharpish edges on it that could come into contact with soft tissue.

Number plates were made from steel plate and an impact along its edge was almost as good as hacking someone with a blunt knife.

Squishy plastic front number plates? It’s a thought I suppose but a front number plate would have to have some sort of rigidity in it and a rigid edge is the dangerous bit.

Re: English Law
 

It's "Whisp" with an h. ;)

Re: English Law
 

Firstly, you are forced to plead guilty in english courts even if you aren't because they get your solicitor to point out that they are going to find you guilty and give you a bigger fine sentence etc if you dont. Been there, got stitched up and paid thousands and I mean thousands in fines, court costs and hiked premiums because of an alleged minor bump in a car park at leicester royal hospital.

Just because the owner says joe bloggs was driving his van doesn't mean that Joe bloggs can't say no the other driver or the owner was driving. This actually happened. Boss told em who was driving, they sent a letter to employee, employee wrote back claiming he wasn't the driver. outcome, several months further on and still pending. They haven't got proof he was driving, only the word of the owner, and who's to say he's telling the truth. It could have been him driving and saying his employee was.

Anyway the new cameras take your mugshot, also new cameras are set to the lowest speeds and they are higher so burning them out is harder but as captain gatso says it is possible to destroy evidence.
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