Just before Christmas, we had two people call us hoping to glean our magical IRP defences to deal with their 90-day Immediate Roadside Prohibitions. In one case, the individual had concocted an argument that was guaranteed to lose. She hired us to take over when she realized that she was in over her head. In the other case, the individual decided to deal with his IRP as DIY.
As we’ve said before, an IRP isn’t a DIY. In some respects, an IRP is a DUI, but that’s another issue entirely.
The client who hired us was lucky because she hadn’t done any damage yet. We found a good and valid defence for her and the IRP was lifted on Christmas Eve. It took a lot of work and we only succeeded because we could show a pattern in all of the disclosure we have accumulated from FOIs and other cases. It also took some work in the library.
We have no idea about the other fellow. IRP cases are complex and the odds of success can be very low. But sometimes you get lucky.
The funny thing we noticed is that these people seemed to be looking to us for magical IRP defences. We’ve seen this before but not two in the same week. They both seemed to be hoping that we could impart one single document which we may have in our collection that would cause their IRP to be lifted. If only they could have access to our material for 5 minutes, they might stumble upon the secret book of magic which allows us to succeed in IRP appeals.
Of course, it doesn’t work this way. We’ve been defending Immediate Roadside Prohibition cases since the day the first version of the legislation came into law. We’ve created the defences, found the defences and forced the Government to change their policies and methods over and over. We now rely on the information we’ve accumulated in thousands and thousands of FOI documents, disclosure documents, reports and studies.
The key for us is to bring it all together to get the best results for our clients. Spotting obscure deficiencies in the police report and then locating the information to back it up is a complex and difficult process. And not every case has a fairy-tale ending. But many do, and that’s our reward for working hard to succeed in our client’s cases.
Admittedly, there have been some magical IRP defences over the years. For example, we helped a lot of people during the Vancouver Photocopy Debacle and we kept that defence to ourselves for a while because it put us in the best position to help our clients. Recently we had another similar situation where we knew that every IRP issued by a certain police force was likely invalid. Kyla figured it out. We told lawyers in the defence community to watch for cases from this detachment. At the same time, however, we kept it to ourselves because public release of the information could have damaged the cases for the clients we were already defending.
Magical IRP defences are hard to come by, which really means that it’s not magic at all. We find these defences through hard work and by being immersed in DUI and impaired driving law.