A Pandora’s Box of Fixed Penalties

This is from the web site of Ashley Mote, A Pandora’s Box of Fixed Penalties Not for the first time this column is raising an issue of importance that has hardly been mentioned in the national media. In a nutshell it is this: Every fixed penalty levied on us without due process of law is illegal. Every penny extracted from us by fixed penalties by the government and its myriad of agencies should be returned. It won’t be, of course. We are talking about parking tickets, speeding tickets, late income tax returns – the lot. Let me explain. The Bill of Rights of 1689 is the law of the land to this day. Clause 12 reads: …that all grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void… In other words, all fixed penalties imposed by the government and their agencies are illegal – and always have been. Anyone being threatened with a fixed penalty must be convicted of an offence in a court of law first. So the government is in a real fix. It is trying desperately to keep the problem under wraps. Doubtless an amending clause in some future piece of legislation will sneakily attempt to get it off the hook. Unfortunately it will be doing far more than that. Any such legislation will be removing a right first recognised in English law over 300 years ago. It has never been tampered with since. The implications are huge – but we’ll come to the practicalities in a moment. One of the most remarkable aspects of this story is how it arose. The government shot itself in the foot. Some years ago a Sunderland market trader was prosecuted for selling a pound of bananas. Other prosecutions followed, and a test case on the use of metric and/or imperial units of measurement ended up in the High Court. The ‘criminals’ became known as the Metric Martyrs. Lord Justice Laws’ judgement included the words “A constitutional statute [in this case the European Communities Act 1972] can only be repealed…by the unambiguous words…of the later statute.” Lord Justice Laws held that the Weights and Measures Act 1985 did no such thing. Therefore, he argued, the traders were obliged to sell goods using metric weights and guilty of an offence by not doing so. One of the men involved in that legal battle was Neil Herron, also a market trader at the time. He spotted that if such a hierarchy of English law did indeed exist, and some laws were above others (a legal principle unknown in English law before the Laws judgement), then such status must apply to all other constitutional statutes – of which the Bill of Rights 1689 is plainly one. Indeed the Laws judgement included an admission that it was. So when Mr Herron later received a parking ticket he refused to pay the penalty charge, and argued the Laws judgement in his defence. He must be prosecuted, he told the local council. But parking offences were de-criminalised in the Road Traffic Act of 1991, so prosecution was not and is not possible, despite the Bill of Rights making no distinction between criminal and civil cases. Thirty parking tickets later, and with more motorists joining the fray every day, Mr Herron is still refusing to pay and successfully arguing the same defence. Hence the government’s dilemma. If it argues in a test case against Mr Herron – or anyone else for that matter - that the Laws judgement is wrong and that the Road Traffic Act does by implication repeal the Bill of Rights clause 12, it will simultaneously be arguing that retailers can sell their wares in pounds and ounces again. Big problem. read the rest of the article Here