A B.C. Court of Appeal panel of judges has restored a man’s conviction for speeding and the $121 ticket that went with it.
“The events underlying this appeal will be familiar to most drivers,” Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon wrote for the three-judge panel in the April 2 decision.
She said police using a laser speed detection system pulled over Kevin Bruce Robinson in Abbotsford in May 2021.
“The device indicated that Mr. Robinson had been travelling at 97 km/h in a 60 km/h signed zone,” Fenlon said.
So, the officer issued a ticket for failing to obey a traffic control device.
The ticket set out details such as the location, date and description of the vehicle, Fenlon said.
“Only the sufficiency of the description of the offence is in issue in these proceedings,” she said.
She said Robinson retained a lawyer articling student to dispute the ticket, with a hearing held in traffic court April 28, 2022.
Before entering a plea, Fenlon said, Robinson had applied to quash the ticket on grounds it did not “contain sufficient detail of the circumstances of the alleged offence to give to the defendant reasonable information with respect to the act or omission to be proved against the defendant and to identify the transaction referred to” as required under the Offence Act.
Robinson said the ticket did not specify the type of traffic control device he had allegedly failed to obey.
The justice of the peace hearing the application to quash the ticket dismissed it and the case continued to trial where Robinson was found guilty.
He appealed on two grounds: that the judge had failed to consider that a defendant be given reasonable information and that the judge failed to consider precedential cases he had presented.
The B.C. Supreme Court judge agreed and quashed the ticket in September 2022.
So, the Crown appealed.
Fenlon agreed with part of what the Supreme Court judge said in finding that the traffic court judge erred in finding the ticket contained enough information.
“The offence of ‘fail to obey traffic device’ covers a wide range of devices: yield signs, stop signs, no stopping signs, no entry signs, no parking signs and speed signs, to name but a few,” Fenlon said. “Nothing on the face of the ticket issued to Mr. Robinson told him what device was in issue.”
She said it is “a long-standing and foundational principle of law that a person charged with an offence must be able to clearly identify what it is they are alleged to have done wrong so that they are in a position to prepare their defence.”
But, the court had heard, the ticket-issuing officer had told Robinson that the then-alleged offence related to a speed limit sign.
What the case came down to was whether or not the traffic court justice of the peace could have amended the ticket prior to trial, Fenlon said. She said it was open to the justice of the peace to amend the ticket but called the error a “harmless one.”
She found the description on the ticket was sufficient and restored the conviction.
