A woman has been handed a legal bill of more than £300 for not paying for car insurance despite telling the court she had paid her bill in full, amid fresh concerns about magistrates handing out speedy convictions behind-closed-doors.
The woman, 32, was taken to court by the DVLA over an allegation that her Mercedes car was not insured in April this year.
Prosecuted through the controversial Single Justice Procedure (SJP) last month, she pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay a £155 fine plus £100 in costs and a £62 victim surcharge.
However the Evening Standard has discovered that she was convicted and sentenced after telling Barkingside magistrates court her insurance company appears to have been to blame for a paperwork mix-up.
“My vehicle has been fully insured with regular payments since purchase”, she wrote in an online plea form.
“My insurers were informed of the private number plate as this was switched over from a previous car, however this was not updated on their system.
“When contacted they updated this information free of charge as a courtesy to not updating the system.”
SJP prosecutions take place behind-closed-doors, making it impossible to know if the magistrate read the women’s statement before passing sentence.
And in a bizarre twist, the woman’s age was accidentally officially recorded as 104-years-old – a detail which does not appear to have been questioned by the court.
Analysis of Ministry of Justice records reveals that a north London magistrate dealt with 82 SJP prosecutions in the space of just 75 minutes on one day in May, at an average of 54 seconds per case.
Fines totalling more than £20,000 were handed out in circumstances where the majority of defendants had not entered a plea and the magistrate had to decide whether there was enough evidence to convict before moving on to the appropriate sentence.
In June, Barkingside magistrates court started holding after-hours SJP sessions, with a magistrate and a legal advisor sitting until 9.30pm while dealing with hundreds of criminal cases.
In one of the sessions, 239 prosecutions for crimes including truancy and littering were dealt with in the space of five hours, resulting in more than £100,000 of fines and an average of just 75 seconds per case.
On another day at Barkingside, a magistrate handed out nearly £70,000 of fines for train fare dodging, averaging 58 seconds per case.
The SJP system, introduced in 2015, allows a single magistrate to deal with low-level criminal cases based on written evidence alone, but they have the power to refer cases into open court for a hearing with a prosecutor present if there are concerns about the written evidence or doubts over the plea.
All prosecuting authorities, including the DVLA, also have the power to withdraw a case before it is put before a magistrate.
Among them was a 78-year-old woman who was convicted and fined despite her daughter telling the court she had been hospitalised in a fall, is now living in a care home, and she has dementia, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia.
Sir Bob Neill MP, who chairs the House of Commons justice select committee, is among those calling for a review of the SJP system, amid fears magistrates are not considering all the evidence in each case.
“A lot of these might be absolute liability offences where you don’t have to have a guilty state of mind but there can often be relevant matters in mitigation that would merit a discharge or absolute discharge”, he said.
“It is a concern that needs to be looked at so that they can be dealt with fairly.”
The DVLA has been contacted for comment.
