On the weekend we received our first calls from people who received IRPs under the new Immediate Roadside Prohibition scheme and on Monday we finally got a look at the new forms. We’ve been analyzing them since. Once again, there are major flaws with the scheme and all of that talk about an expanded review process is a pile of garbage. The new material is designed to further limit arguments you can make and to hide the evidence that would help differentiate guilty individuals from those who are innocent. Instead of complying with the direction of the court, the new forms are designed to hide deficiencies in police evidence, essentially substituting evidence of what took place with check boxes that limit the options of what evidence the police may provide.
For example, the officer may no longer describe on the form the evidence that the subject had care and control. The officer is given only one option for the source of any odour of liquor, i.e. a check box that it was on the subject’s breath. By simply completing the report the officer has no option but to agree that “Any ASD tests referred to in this report were conducted by a qualified ASD operator and the ASD units were functioning correctly.” So much for evidence. It’s all about a police officer’s opinion expressed in the form of a check box.
It’s hard to imagine, but the new system is actually a huge step backward. This is new legal trickery designed to eliminate the chance to succeed on review. Our only hope is that the OSMV adjudicators recognize what’s going on and refuse to give any weight to evidence that is pre-generated for the police on a form. But we’re not holding our breath.
It is interesting to see that the Government has taken so many creepy steps to try and head off many of the issues that we have outlined on our blog. This they have done while denying that there ever was a problem. And their steps merely exacerbate many of the issues we’ve identified, rather than taking any legitimate steps toward making the system more fair.
Time permitting, we’ll give some more analysis in the coming weeks. We are already disputing a number of new IRPs, so we will report back on how this plays out. However, because we are preparing our legal arguments for the judicial challenges yet to come, we may hold back some information that the Government could try to spin.
BC Government computers access our blog more than any other single group. We know this, so we need to be careful about what we say. And we are sure that they have been waiting to read our commentary on the new Immediate Roadside Prohibition scheme.