No steering for the wheels of justice.

Drink driving is one of those things that most people agree is probably not a good thing. There may be some debate over the ideal limit, and libertarians may even prefer to test the level of actual impairment rather than compare the quantity of alcohol detected to an arbitrary limit*, but I think it's safe to say that nobody really wants to people who are completely shitfaced to be driving cars. But if you don't think out all the law surrounding the issue with great care you can potentially end up with cases that make the law look... well, inflexible, unjust and stupid. Like getting banned despite an alcohol reading of zero for instance.

In February 2007, Mr Di Milta says he drove home from work to take his sick 11-year-old daughter Marisa to hospital. The girl was in excruciating pain after two lots of spinal surgery and Mr Di Milta admits to rushing home, driving at about 65 km/h in a 60 km/h zone.

Not far from his house, he was stopped at a booze bus, where he told a policewoman about his situation. She told him to get out of the car, but he drove off.

Half an hour later, while his daughter lay in hospital, Mr Di Milta returned to the booze bus, apologised to the same policewoman and took a breath test, which returned a blood-alcohol level of zero.

Mr Di Milta was charged with failing to stop at a booze bus and his lawyer later entered a guilty plea - allegedly without consulting him. A finding of guilt or conviction carries a mandatory licence suspension of two years.

So other than minor speeding to a degree that could also be achieved by a damn good tailwind Mr Di Milta's offence was a technical one. No doubt the law was designed in this way so that those who might consider evading the random tests by driving away from the booze bus are presumed guilty and punished to the same extent, the idea being to make it a waste of time driving off. Clearly that's not the case here since Di Milta not only returned to the booze bus but did so within such a short space of time that it's simply not credible that he'd have been over the limit at the first stop and had a BAC of zero when he came back. So what was he punished for? Failing to offer instant obedience to a police officer? I doubt that one's on the statute books and I also doubt that the cop was taking a vindictive attitude toward a clearly compassionate father put his daughter above obeying her instructions. I imagine there's probably a reporting procedure for drive-aways that she was expected to follow and she may well have expected that someone higher up would sort it out fairly. Like the court, maybe? If that was what the police woman was thinking I can't blame her because it's not an unreasonable expectation that courts are there to see justice done, but either because of the law or because nobody stopped to consider if charging Mr Di Milta was really in the public interest an injustice was done instead.

''No one asked me anything. The magistrate talked with the lawyer and my licence was suspended for two years,'' Mr Di Milta said.

Poor bastard. And insult has been added to injury.

When he returned to court to get his licence back this month, he could not answer a magistrate's question about how long it would take for a standard drink to leave his body to reach a zero blood alcohol reading.

The magistrate then ordered him to undertake a drink-driving course and that an alcohol interlock device be fitted on his car.

Why the hell put him through this? Why bother making him go through the indignity of having to have his car modified as if he was a recidivist drink driver? Why send him on a patently unnecessary course? Why even ask him the fucking question when the test he gave in relation to the offence for which he was banned came back with a zero alcohol reading?

''I thought I'd paid my price,'' Mr Di Milta, a chef, said. ''Why do I get punished for something I did not do? I'm not a drink-driver.''

Why indeed. Apparently the way the law is written may be part of it...

Traffic law experts consulted by The Age said that while Mr Di Milta could have possibly beaten the charge with a defence of necessity, a guilty plea meant that, under the law, the magistrate had no choice but to suspend his licence.

The necessity defence has been successfully run in several traffic cases. They include the case of a man who drove to the chemist to get his ill wife an asthma puffer and ignored a booze bus, only to return to it later and record an blood alcohol reading well above the legal limit.

... but you'd have thought that someone at some stage, either prosecutors or beaks at the original trial or at Mr Di Milta's more recent appearance, would have noticed that they're beating on the poor guy for a trivial technical infringement and that the punishment he's received goes way beyond what we might loosely call his crime.

Legally, magistrates can order people convicted of not stopping at a booze bus to take a drink-driving course, while a minimum six-month fitting of an alcohol interlock device is mandatory for those convicted.

'Can' order, you see, not 'must'. Their hands may be legally tied as far as the (pointless in this case) alcohol interlock device is concerned, in which case you'd hope that intellectual honesty would cut in and they'd be making waves up the chain to get the law amended, but the fact that they're forcing him to go on this drink driving course without any apparent justification for doing so makes it look like the real crime, the unspoken and unofficial offence, was failing to be deferential and obedient to authority. Since Mr Di Milta's insurance company will probably take a dim view of his conviction without taking any interest in the facts he can look forward to his punishment continuing for some time in the form of unnecessarily high premiums. In the quest for safer roads the wheels of justice just keep running this guy over. It'd be ironic if it wasn't so bloody outrageous.


* We've all seen those Police-Camera-Crash type TV shows from the US where suspected drunk drivers are made to stand on one leg or precisely walk along white lines or touch their nose while keeping their eyes closed. Compared to simply getting drivers to blow into a tube and nicking 'em if a light turns red the American cops look like they're working with stone knives and animal skins, but the truth is quite different. The roadside impairment tests are really rather clever at identifying drivers who have drunk enough to make them poorly co-ordinated and therefore unlikely to drive well. And there are two big advantages to testing impairment: first, a big guy who can hold his booze well might be less impaired than a two pot screamer who drank much less, yet with a hard blood / breath alcohol limit it could well be the guy who drank less who'd be under the limit and allowed to drive the rest of the way home. Secondly it would automatically pick up drivers who haven't had a drop but are impaired for other reasons - drugs, lack of sleep, medical reasons, whatever. When you take your driving test all that's being considered is your ability to operate a car safely, and those who can't are knocked back. The same thinking should be applied to road side testing. All that matters is whether I am safe to drive - if I'm not the reasons are pretty irrelevant.