A Queensland barrister who challenged a $146 speeding fine on constitutional grounds has had his argument rejected by the state’s highest court.
Tony Morris QC, whose Volvo wagon was photographed 7km/h over the 50km/h limit by a police camera in Brisbane last August, contested the fine on the grounds he was not driving the car at the time – but also refused to say who was.
The attorney general took the matter to the court of appeal, which on Tuesday dismissed Morris’s argument that state traffic laws allowing him to be held liable were invalid because they forced the court to rely on a legal “fiction”.
Police did not contest Morris’s claim he was not the driver, after he said judges he was meeting at the time were willing to testify as to his whereabouts.
Morris argued a magistrate imposing the fine on him would have to find “as a fact, a fiction, namely, that the person in charge was driving the vehicle when the speeding offence was photographically detected”.
The barrister, representing himself, cited a string of high court cases and another from 1926 that established the invalidity of legislators trying to force courts to impose a stealing offence on someone who held stolen goods.
Morris has previously invoked a spousal privilege case from 1817 in arguing that he cannot be forced to identify the speeding driver.
The appeal court found that the section of the Transport Operations Act under which Morris would be fined – despite not being the driver – did not force a magistrate to pretend that he was.
Justice Catherine Holmes in a written judgment said: “No finding as to the identity of the actual driver need be made.”
“To conclude that criminal responsibility is attributed to an individual … the magistrate must find, and need only find, that a speeding offence has happened; that the offence has been detected by a photographic detection device; and that the individual was the person in charge of the speeding vehicle at the time,” she said.
“Thus, there is no intrusion upon the judicial function by requiring a fiction to be found as fact.”
Morris declined to comment. The matter will now be sent back to the magistrates court.
