What do you do about lady drivers?

Celebrity lawyer Nick Freeman, known as Mr Loophole, has performed motoring miracles for clients from Andrew Flintoff to Jeremy Clarkson. But what advice would he give a lady driver? The man himself offers these exclusive tips

The other week, I was reading the paper when my attention was drawn to a story about female drivers. The piece related the results of an insurance company survey that revealed that eight out of 10 women involved in a car crash denied it was their fault and looked for something – or someone – else to blame. Classic excuses ranged from ‘a moth flew into my eye’ to ‘I swerved to avoid a fox’.

It’s easy to chuckle at this (which I did – particularly over ‘my windscreen was shattered after an angry squirrel threw a nut’). Though, in fact, women are easier to defend than men. But tempestuous rodents aside, when it comes to motoring law, the common assumption is that it all boils down to finger pointing. Find a cause or culprit to blame and you nail the case. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. And when a client first instructs me, listening to their account of what happened is way down my list of priorities when it comes to assessing their case.

So how do I find the so-called loophole (legal) arguments? Well, the first thing I do is comb through the Crown papers to see if the police and prosecuting authorities have done their job properly. Are names spelt correctly on the relevant documents? Has every bit of paperwork been filed within the correct time frame? Have the lads down at the station dealt with the client by the book?

If the answer to these points and many more is no, then the prosecution may be awed. It doesn’t matter if, factually, my client may be ‘guilty’ of driving over the speed or alcohol limit. If the Crown hasn’t ful-
lled its legal obligation, then the case implodes and my client is acquitted.

Take the time I defended Claire Ince. The wife of former Manchester United and England footballer Paul Ince, was accused of doing 100mph in her Mercedes CL600. But the car was registered in her husband’s name. So when the speeding notice arrived, Paul, as the registered keeper, had the legal obligation to fill it in, naming his wife as the driver. However, in her alacrity to take responsibility for the matter, Claire innocently filled in the form herself. This made her confession inadmissible, as I told magistrates. The prosecuting authorities hadn’t picked this up and the unnoticed error paved the way to her acquittal.

Of course, some prosecution cases are watertight. It’s only then that I turn to my client’s testimony to see if there’s anything they can tell me that will provide them with a defence.

Over the years, the papers have reported many of my celebrity cases, such as Sir Alex Ferguson and David Beckham, all of which have been netted through legal loopholes. Celebrated cases like this add to the impression that motoring law is unapologetically macho, since it seems to relate to testosterone- fuelled alpha males racing around in their souped-up motors. Actually, at least 50 per cent of my clients are women and in the case of drink-driving charges, that
gure climbs to around 55 per cent.

Nick Freeman: where there’s a loophole, there’s a way

However, though the statute itself is, if you like, gender neutral, in reality, it’s much easier to
find loopholes for female clients than for men. It’s the same law for all, but there’s greater scope for using it for women because of the way they are made. By that I mean complex: emotional, hormonal and, well, different.

Any feminists may now want to look away. But, in my experience, women can be far more emotional than men when it comes to dealing with a stressful situation. And when it comes to a defence, they can be an unwitting bene
ficiary of that emotional state. Down at the police station, facing a charge of drink driving, a woman may be crying so hard or feel so overwhelmed that her powers of comprehension are shattered. A police officer might be dismissive of this. And instead of calming down the distraught motorist, or checking she has understood the statutory warning he reads to her, he’ll robotically thrash on with his job.

But if you’re crying that badly, you won’t understand what’s going on. And as far as the case is concerned, that affords you a defence. Bring on an expert in court who says that when people cry they are emotionally distracted and you’re on strong ground. Emotions manifest themselves in many di‘fferent ways and part of being a loophole lawyer means being tuned in to the way people react.

I once defended a model who had been charged with drink driving after an evening out with her husband. It looked like a straightforward guilty plea, but when I rang my client to tell her this, I detected an unnatural hesitancy in her voice, as though there was something she wanted to tell me. My hunch was right. As would come out in court, she revealed the reason she’d driven that night was because her husband had forced her to.

Ploughing into the deepest corner of my law books, I came across a magnificent loophole: the coercion clause of the Criminal Justice Act 1925 – a defence available to all wives who’ve been forced to commit crimes by their husbands. It was a clause that was introduced to replace the old common law presumption that a wife formed part of her husband’s chattels – and would be the
first time the law would be used successfully in a driving case. My model client was acquitted.

So, can anyone go hunting out loopholes when they
nd themselves facing a motoring charge? Well, put it like this. If you had toothache, and you knew which tooth was causing the problem, would you pull it out or get a professional on the case?

Sure, you would notice the pain in your tooth in the same way that you might spot a spelling mistake on your speeding notice. I successfully defended explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes for an alleged speeding o‘ffence when the letter summoning him to court was addressed to Mr Ran Flenns. No such person exists. So how could the case go ahead?

But the critical part is knowing what to do with it; how to convert the mistake into an acquittal. This isn’t an opportunity to drum up business. Without a lawyer on the case, ironically, you could self-incriminate if you use the information you have in the wrong way. I’d like to think the way I practise law has made our roads safer – that by pointing out potholes in the system, the Government will go ahead and
ll them in. Meanwhile, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing and finding those loopholes. Angry squirrels, you have been warned.

The Art Of The Loophole: Making The Law Work For You by Nick Freeman (Coronet, £20).