We’re all for tooting our own horn. There’s pride in a job well done and we appreciate recognition for good work. Ever since we started collecting the statistics, our law office has succeeded in the most 90-day Immediate Roadside Prohibitions each month. It’s a badge of honour and it’s something we work hard to maintain.
The July statistics blew our minds. Like the photo for this post, we’re not really sure what it all means.
The IRP brainpower in our office is unparalleled if you judge by the Government records.
Moreover, there is a real advantage our lawyers enjoy by virtue of the fact that we appeal so many IRPs. After all, IRPs are the most common type of impaired driving case we now have in BC. We deal with them from every city and town in BC. So we spot patterns in disclosure that would be almost impossible to identify if we only handled a few each month.
Meaning we’re succeeding in a great number of IRP appeals. But the July statistics blew our minds. Like the photo for this post, we’re not really sure what it all means.
July 2015 statistics
It will take some time for us to crunch the numbers, but a couple things jump out right away. The most significant is that we succeeded in more IRP appeals than every other lawyer and law office in BC combined.
Yes. If you count every successful decision from every other lawyer in BC who received a successful IRP review decision in July 2015 – add them all up — the three lawyers in our office who conduct IRP hearings succeeded in more review decisions than the entire collection of lawyers in other firms in BC (by a wide margin).
We need to think through the statistics. However, we’re not taking a break by any means.
The more we dig, the more we find. The more we find, the more we succeed. So we’re going to keep digging. And as we work through the July 2015 statistics, expect us to toot our own horn a little here on our blog.
Defective breathalyzer update
A police officer commenting on our Acumen Law Facebook page a few weeks ago suggested that we should have disclosed the defective breathalyzer evidence at an earlier date. We knew, however, that even though the evidence was overwhelming, the Government would want to try and challenge it. When it comes to the IRP scheme they’ll deny and deny until the bitter end. They’ve sunk so much into a badly conceived legal scheme that they’re terrified of the consequences if/when it collapses.
(It’s very similar to the NDP and the fast-cat ferries: a poorly thought out Government initiative implemented by people who lacked the understanding to see why it was wrong.)
So even with overwhelming evidence, they’re still going to use your tax money to defend every legal challenge to the scheme.
We revealed the defective breathalyzer problem to the Government well over a year ago. Someone decided that pulling the devices would be an admission of guilt so the police kept using them.
Looking back we would have predicted this if we were more cynical. As it is, apparently we still maintained a shred of hope that someone would step up and say “Hey. I have an idea! Maybe we shouldn’t use defective breathalyzers and we should fix things for the people we wrongly punished.”
But nobody stepped up. And so now we’re headed to court.
Defective breathalyzers in BC Supreme Court
We selectively started appeals to BC Supreme Court to conduct judicial reviews in certain cases. Our intention here is to put the pieces together so that every person who received an IRP on the basis of the results of a defective breathalyzer will have a remedy.
We picked cases that make sense to appeal. The facts in the cases are important, but we didn’t just pick the extreme cases. We wanted emblematic cases. We wanted cases that, if we’re successful, will have the broadest impact for people who are still hoping for justice in their own case.
We need to sew this up tight.
The project is well underway.
In fact, Kyla has already made her arguments to the judge in the first case that has an implication for the other defective breathalyzer cases. We’re just waiting for the Court to rule. And there are more appeals set for this month (September 2015).
The downside
One problem we have is that we can only appeal cases that we lose. And we don’t lose very often. If you want to go by the July 2015 statistics, we’d have almost nothing to appeal.
But something really sad is that not many people challenge their IRP. In July 2015, the police in BC issued 1499 IRPs. If we represented all of those people, extrapolating from the July 2015 statistics, we may very well have succeeded in most of them.
Sadly, only 365 people appealed their IRP in July 2015. Of the people who didn’t hire us, most of them lost. 🙁
Of the people who did hire us, most of them succeeded. 🙂