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Vehicles Now Doing Time
The Road Safety Act has mandatory sentencing for many types of traffic offences. Perhaps the most severe is the mandatory one month jail term for any person caught for a second time driving on a suspended or disqualified licence.
However, a Sentencing Advisory Council report, released in May recommended the abolition of the one month jail term. Instead, cars, rather than drivers, would be locked up under a controversial proposal to tackle a sharp rise in disqualified motorists defying their bans.
The report says the penalty has proved ineffective and is being widely ignored by both drivers and magistrates. The council proposes tougher laws to seize and impound such drivers' vehicles for at least three months.
It has also called for the use of automated number-plate recognition technology to detect more unlicensed and suspended drivers.
The technology, which is being trialed by police, can be used to identify vehicles registered to a banned driver.
The council recommends that police be able to apply to a court for an order impounding or immobilising the vehicle of any person who, having been found guilty of driving while suspended or disqualified in the previous three years, repeats the offence.
It says the driver should be deprived of the vehicle for three months, or for the remainder of the period of suspension or disqualification, whichever is longer.
The number of people found guilty of driving while banned has almost trebled in six years, from fewer than 3000 in 2000-01 to 8600 in 2006-07.
But more than half (54.5 per cent) of all those found guilty of a second or subsequent offence were freed by magistrates on wholly suspended sentences rather than serving any time behind bars.
Victoria is the only state that has a mandatory minimum jail sentence for repeat disqualified driving.
The council's report reveals that 31 drivers sentenced in the three years from 2004-05 to 2006-07 had 20 or more prior offences of driving while disqualified or suspended; but a quarter of them were not jailed.
In that period, only half of the 557 drivers with five or six prior offences were actually jailed. Almost 30 per cent of the 557 received wholly suspended sentences.
Source: Herald Sun
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