Case Report: No Insurance, Glasgow Sheriff & JP Court

Our client, Miss L, was charged with driving without insurance and summoned to attend Glasgow Sheriff and Justice of the Peace Court earlier this month.

Miss L contacted our specialist road traffic lawyer, Mr Sheridan, for free legal advice as she was understandably worried after receiving her court summons. She was anxious about attending court for the first time and was concerned about the consequences that a conviction for driving without insurance would have on her driving licence.

Unfortunately, she had every reason to be worried as with six active penalty points on her driving licence she was facing a totting up disqualification of six months as well as a conviction which she explained would have adversely impacted on her promotion prospects at work.

She explained that the situation had come about as she had been in an accident due to another driver crashing into her. When police attended they established through routine checks that she wasn’t insured to drive the vehicle which belonged to her partner.  This came as a surprise to Miss L as when her partner arranged the insurance he had advised her that she was a named driver on the policy and she had always been named on policies taken out over the years prior to that.

In these circumstances we had to advise Miss L that although the fact that she wasn’t named on the policy appeared to be down to some sort of breakdown in communication between her partner and the insurance company she was technically guilty of the alleged offence. However, although she was guilty we were still able to help her.

We were able to confirm that as she had a reasonably held belief at the time of the alleged offence that she was insured to drive she had a strong “special reasons” argument.

This meant that if we fully prepared her special reasons argument, provided specialist legal representation and used the latest caselaw we were extremely confident that, although she wouldn’t avoid the conviction, she could avoided the penalty points and fine applicable. However, this did not resolve the issue of the conviction affecting her promotion prospects at work!

Accordingly, we decided to proceed on the basis that the special reasons argument was our default position and instead worked on preparing an argument to persuade the Procurator Fiscal that it was not in the public interest to proceed with the prosecution.

Our specialist road traffic lawyer, Mr Sheridan, worked with Miss L to prepare a robust and detailed argument and prior to the case calling he had a meeting with the Procurator Fiscal depute at court. Following detailed discussions our Mr Sheridan was successful in persuading the procurator fiscal to discontinue the prosecution on the basis it was not in the public interest.

This meant our client avoided conviction and the penalties that may have arisen from that, kept her driving licence and could pursue a promotion at work- a fantastic result and another very happy client!

If you have been charged with any motoring offence contact us now on 0141 465 3333 to see how we can assist you!!!