WRONG TURN

Attorney-at-law Gavin Goffe has described as “curious” the Government's about-turn in granting a reprieve to motorists with outstanding traffic tickets after insisting for weeks that it would not bow to pressure to declare an amnesty.

On Tuesday night, the Government gave motorists up to January 31, 2023, to pay outstanding tickets racked up since February 1, 2018. If the deadline is met, it said, the demerit points accrued would be expunged. Additionally, it pledged to wipe clean the slate of all violations that occurred on or before that date.

The new Road Traffic Act is expected to come into force next February.

For weeks, the Government had remained firm in its rebuffing calls for an amnesty from public transport operators, many of whom withdrew their services for several days, insisting that it would not yield to or support lawlessness.

Goffe said that although the amnesty does not only apply to public passenger vehicle operators, the Government's change of heart may indicate that it has discovered new information or is considering a new strategy.

“Their decision to include tickets that even pre-date 2018 just seems rather curious because those would have already been captured under the last amnesty,” the attorney told The Gleaner, adding that the Government's reluctance to define the offer as an amnesty was surprising.

“We know that there are two ingredients for [an] amnesty which this government has put in place ... . One ingredient is that you have to pay for the amount on the ticket and the second is that all of the demerit points will be removed in connection with those tickets,” he said.

The only distinction, he continued, in this instance, was that the offender would get a court-ordered fine. However, the money received – whether it be from a court fine or a traffic ticket fine – was still being given over to the Government, Goffe said.

In an interview on Nationwide News Network, de facto information minister Robert Morgan has insisted that the payment arrangement was not an amnesty. rather, he said, it was the Government's way of ensuring that things were done right “once and for all” in relation to the traffic ticket payment management system.

Morgan, who conceded that the old system was “very flawed”, said that in this instance, the Government sought to ensure that it would not “trespass on the power and discretion of the courts”, but that once a ticket passes 21 days, the offender and the court would deliberate on whether it was fairly given.

But Goffe contends that the arrangement would only put incautious drivers back on the roads with the demerit points accrued over the last four and a half years by thousands of motorists being annulled.

He said that such a move sends the wrong message to motorists who had gone ahead and paid their fines as mandated and had suffered from the suspension of their licences.

“So, everybody who has been law-abiding and doing the right thing is now in a worse position than those who flouted the law, so overall I think that it's a really poor policy position to take,” he argued, noting that amnesties do not help in correcting bad behaviour.

Earlier this month, Private Sector Organization of Jamaica (PSOJ) Vice-President Dr Parris Lyew-Ayee Jr projected that Jamaica would exceed its 2021 record of 481 fatalities by December 31. As of Wednesday, 456 fatalities had been recorded.

In a Twitter post on Wednesday, Goffe also suggested that amnesty may be “connected to the class-action lawsuit claiming a refund of unlawfully issued traffic tickets that comes before the Supreme Court tomorrow”.

Last year, the Government had announced its intention to rake in more than $200 million from road traffic fines, but that effort was halted by a court injunction which prevented the police from issuing traffic tickets in excess of fines as at 2006 until the trial, in 2023, of the claim brought by Maurice Housen against the attorney general and the commissioner of police.

Housen is contending that fixed penalties for road traffic offences under the 1938 Road Traffic Act have not been increased by the Parliament or the Minister of Transport in accordance with Section 116 of the Act.  

He said instead the fines were purportedly increased by the finance minister in 2006 and 2007 as if they were taxes or duties under the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act.

Housen is claiming that the finance minister has no power or authority to increase fines or fix penalties under the road traffic act.  

“The Government has not denied that those tickets were unlawful, they haven't admitted it either ... and they have not denied that anyone who got a ticket during those years would be entitled to some kind of refund,” Goffe said.

Meanwhile, National Road Safety Council Vice Chairman Dr Lucien Jones told The Gleaner that the payment arrangement may have two effects. The first is that public transport operators who faced losing their licences or having them suspended might use it as “a wake-up call” to change their behaviour and help to create a less chaotic transportation system. He expressed hope that this will materialise, but cautioned that alternatively, operators “may just accept the amnesty as a licence to go and behave in the same way that they have been behaving”.

Lyew-Ayee Jr told The Gleaner that he was also deeply worried about the perceived lack of justice and fairness for offenders who had already paid their fines and received demerits.

He added that apart from ticketing individuals, the Government needs to review the licensing of vehicles and ensure a proper mechanism to pay tickets is in place and fines accurately reflected on the system.

“This mechanism needs to be connected and integrated into everything from driver's licence records to vehicle registration. Every single driver and motor vehicle should have renewed or registered something over the past 10 years,” he said.

According to Jones, the new system's robustness would determine how many offenders are collared, adding that electronic ticketing will prevent errors at the tax and court offices.

“I am fairly confident that those new offenders will be held in the new system,” he said.

asha.wilks@gleanerjm.com