[Silhouette]

If you disagree with a penalty issued by the police, you can appeal to the judicial branch.

This is a fine principle provided that someone innocent who defends themselves successfully in court will then be compensated so they don't lose out in any way. The reality appears to be that for things like minor traffic offences, you can wind up spending more time and far more money travelling to have your day in court than you would have lost if you just paid up under protest, and you might also be risking a higher penalty if the court does find you guilty of exactly what you were previously charged with.

With motoring offences there is also the points system to consider, so it might be worth going to court for that reason. However, generally someone prosecuted but found not guilty in the UK doesn't seem to get any sort of compensation for even actual financial losses they incur defending themselves, never mind the value of their lost time or anything to make up for the obvious distress for an extended period that going to court in these cases is likely to cause.

It's rather like the small claims track. In principle, it's a worthy public service. In practice, for a professional with a full time job and family commitments who is working without expert advice because the point is to avoid involving expensive lawyers in low-value cases, the time just to figure out how to file against someone without jeopardizing your case before it's even started is prohibitive.

[UVB-76]

Unfortunately, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Defending yourself against an accusation will always be costly.

I take comfort in the fact that the authorities very rarely make completely baseless accusations. There are certainly cases in which officers were mistaken, there are mitigating circumstances, or you can avoid punishment on a technicality, but I can't think of any instances in which authorities have been caught issuing vexatious fixed penalty notices.

[Silhouette]

Unfortunately, that's just the way the cookie crumbles. Defending yourself against an accusation will always be costly.

Why must it always be costly? It is a perfectly rational alternative policy to bring a smaller number of prosecutions, and to compensate defendants for their costs, wasted time and distress, if a prosecution fails.

I take comfort in the fact that the authorities very rarely make completely baseless accusations.

You might like to look up some of the published data about the proportion of appeals that succeed against things like local-authority-issued parking tickets and ANPR-based congestion charges. It happens all the time, and erroneous charges aren't even close to the kind of isolated incidents you seem to believe they are.

As a matter of fact, there have been plenty of stories of deliberate policies to issue penalties aggressively (and sometimes outright unlawfully), but this doesn't really matter to the victims anyway. Whether it was malicious on the part of the authorities or their enforcement people just got duped as in the cloning case you mentioned makes no difference at all to an innocent third party who gets slapped with a penalty notice they didn't deserve.

[UVB-76]

> Why must it always be costly? It is a perfectly rational alternative policy to bring a smaller number of prosecutions, and to compensate defendants for their costs, wasted time and distress, if a prosecution fails.

I'm not well versed in the details, but I understand you can reclaim certain costs incurred in defending yourself in such cases.

It is, alas, completely impracticable to cover all costs, as many of the costs (compensation for the distress caused, time spent worrying about the case, etc.) are non-pecuniary.

Hence defending an accusation will always be costly. No one is ever going to come out of a court case, even when proven innocent, thinking the whole experience had a net positive impact on their life.

> You might like to look up some of the published data about the proportion of appeals that succeed against things like local-authority-issued parking tickets and ANPR-based congestion charges. It happens all the time, and erroneous charges aren't even close to the kind of isolated incidents you seem to believe they are.

That's what I was referring to in the subsequent qualification. People routinely get off the hook for such infractions on technicalities, but that doesn't render the initial accusation baseless.

Generally speaking, the person will have been at the location on the given date, doing something or other that gave the authority good reason to issue them with a fine.

If they were not, it is usually a reasonable misunderstanding (e.g. cloned plates, stolen car, taken without owner's consent, ANPR system mis-read a plate) and relatively straightforward to clear up.

> Whether it was malicious on the part of the authorities or their enforcement people just got duped as in the cloning case you mentioned makes no difference at all to an innocent third party who gets slapped with a penalty notice they didn't deserve.

What else are you going to do? Stop issuing penalties for motoring offences full-stop because a tiny percentage of vehicles on the road are stolen, or taken without the owners' consent, or have cloned plates, and thus issuing a penalty to the owner will stress them out?

[Silhouette]

I'm not well versed in the details, but I understand you can reclaim certain costs incurred in defending yourself in such cases.

Very little. If you've had professional legal representation then naturally the legal profession tends to look out for them, but the compensation to defendants personally (and to other parties involved in a case, such as witnesses and jurors) for their time and inconvenience is negligible.

What else are you going to do? Stop issuing penalties for motoring offences

It is sad that you dismiss that possibility without even considering it. Our structure for penalising poor driving in the UK is woefully unfit for purpose:

1. Its sanctions aren't an effective deterrent for the relatively small number of drivers whose behaviour really is habitually unacceptable and likely to cause significant problems for others.

2. It penalises many generally good drivers for breaking arbitrary rules without any evidence that what they did was actually dangerous, or even inconveniencing anyone else.

3. In some cases, it even gives drivers a despicable choice between driving safely and driving legally, because obeying those arbitrary rules when they are obviously inappropriate under the circumstances will antagonise and/or inconvenience other road users. Some of those other users will then do something more dangerous, such as performing a risky overtaking manoeuvre, and while the law may say that the other driver is then responsible for the resulting accident, that is of no comfort to the innocent and now dead third driver who was coming the other way and wound up in the head-on collision.

5. It penalises many generally good drivers for minor errors that everyone makes at some point, based essentially on luck. If everyone were actually prosecuted reliably and uniformly for these offences, so many drivers would lose their licence within a month that the law would be brought down or the government would be. Because prosecutions instead happen only intermittently and the law is inconsistently applied, it instead serves as an effective fund-raising tool, often with a glaring conflict of interest where effectively altering driver behaviour would reduce revenues so the incentives are aligned with catching people out rather than deterring undesired actions, and it breeds driver resentment.

In short, our system does not effectively defer serious bad behaviour, while simultaneously penalising behaviour that may not have caused any real problem at all and reducing general respect for the law among a very large proportion of the adult population.

With the rise of automated penalties where no review by a human with common sense need even be involved, man is now judged (often erroneously) by machine, and as I've been arguing, that means the system causes wildly disproportionate distress to a significant number of completely innocent people. I don't accept your claim that the people getting off on these appeals were almost always there and doing something wrong really and just got off on technicalities. I've never seen any data to support that position, in contrast to numerous reports that would indicate otherwise and demonstrate beyond any doubt that these kinds of automated enforcement systems are often fundamentally flawed.

(Just to be clear: I have been a driver for many years, and never had so much as a parking ticket. I have no personal axe to grind here. I just think obviously broken "justice" systems should be fixed, not defended as if making something the law automatically makes it right.)