You’d think that being over the drink drive limit, having no licence, and no insurance would mean that you’d give the police a wide berth if you were driving past them.
Mind you, to get like that in the first place you’d probably have had a certain kind of upbringing – and therefore if you saw your father, for example, as you drove by, and noticed that he had been stopped by the police for some reason, then you might decide to go and poke your nose in and see if you could “help” (even though there is no recorded case of some caveman ever managing to successfully “help” another caveman when he has interfere with police business like this).
And this is what happened to Leon Fitzpatrick from Sunderland. He’d been on the booze the night before and as he was driving to work he saw that his father had been pulled over. Up to this point the police weren’t even aware of his existence. But then he decided to go and poke his nose in, and that was when the officers noticed the smell of alcohol on his breath. Naturally, routine checks then identified the breaches of licence conditions.
His defence lawyer was Anna Haq – a name which I recognise from a story not long ago, but which I haven’t bothered to look up. Her pathetic mitigating comments were:
He would never have been arrested if he had not got out of that vehicle, there was no evidence of bad driving.
Ah, well that’s OK then. He could have then just gone and driven through a school crossing and everything would have been fine.
He was banned for 14 months and fined a total of £215.