Lawyers agree traffic laws need seeing to

Traffic laws should empower judges and magistrates to order a person convicted of a serious offence to do the driving test again once a licence is suspended, a lawyer is suggesting.

“Perhaps the time has come to amend the law to allow a judge to order a convicted person to sit for his driving test again after the period of a licence suspension elapses,” lawyer Simon Micallef Stafrace said.

Earlier this week, a court of appeal reduced a 10-year driving ban to six months in the case of a young driver who ran over twin girls in Attard last year,.

The sisters, Sarah Marie and Rebecca Marie Falzon, are still recovering from the injuries they had sustained in the incident, which occurred in the evening of April 28, 2010 as they crossed the zebra crossing after leaving their Christian doctrine class.

The appeal court confirmed the two-year jail term given to 21-year-old drug addict Maximilian Ciantar, from Marsa. It reduced the driving ban and ruled that it be effective immediately and not once Mr Ciantar left jail, as the previous court had ordered.

The judge noted that, although Mr Ciantar had previous traffic convictions, this was the first time he was found guilty of reckless and dangerous driving. According to law, his licence had to be suspended for a minimum of three months.

Roberta Lepre, from Victim Support Malta, agreed with Dr Micallef Stafrace’s suggestion, and said: “The right to drive should not be automatic... so it does make sense to impose another test on someone who committed a crime, which would mean completely revoking a licence.”

Dr Lepre was concerned that a brief suspension as that given to Mr Ciantar sent the wrong message to society. Although a judge should not deliver a sentence with this message in mind, more weight had to be given to the consequences faced by victims, she said.

When contacted, Dr Micallef Stafrace, who specialises in traffic law, said one had to keep in mind that Mr Ciantar was jailed for two years, so justice was served. “The message that was sent out there was that if you drive like a mad man you will go to prison,” he said.

It was important to ensure that the court was allowed discretion to be able to hand down a judgement according to the merits of a case. There were many forms of accidents caused by reckless driving but there were various levels of recklessness, he explained.

For this reason, he agreed that the parameters of the law should remain open even though he believed the licence suspension should come into force after the jail term.

Lawyers Joseph Giglio and Arthur Azzopardi pointed out that the decision of the appeal court – to apply the ban immediately – fit in with the interpretation of the law.

There was a void in the law that should be addressed because there was nothing excluding a judge from ordering that the ban come into effect before a jail term, Dr Giglio said.

He added that the six-month suspension made sense given that, by law, a person convicted of reckless driving a second time would be banned from driving for a minimum of a year. This was the first time Mr Ciantar had been found guilty of reckless and dangerous driving.

Dr Azzopardi agreed there was need to review the traffic regulations that contained anomalies. He believed the law should include a minimum and maximum period for licence bans to ensure consistency across judgments.

He added that, according to decision by the UK’s House of Lords, it was not advisable to suspend licences for long periods. Human nature had shown that a person was likely to drive during such a long period. This would mean that the person would be driving illegally and without insurance cover and if that person was involved in an accident the situation would just get worse.