DPP v Kay
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 13 April 1998 |
| Date | 13 April 1998 |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
Queen's Bench Divisional Court
Road traffic - technical error in breath test - test valid
If a roadside breath test was a genuine inquiry into whether an offence under sections 3, 4 or 5 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 had been committed and was conducted in good faith, justices should be slow to exclude evidence of the taking of the substantive specimen of breath because of a technical shortcoming in the roadside procedure.
The Queen's Bench Divisional Court (Lord Justice Roch and Mr Justice Potts) so held on March 4, allowing an appeal by way of case stated of the prosecution against the dismissal by Bury Justices of an information charging John Kay with having failed to provide a specimen of breath for analysis contrary to section 7(6) of the 1988 Act on October 29, 1996.
LORD JUSTICE ROCH stated that the roadside police officer's innocent failure to follow the manufacturer's instructions about allowing a 20-minute gap to elapse from consumption of the last drink to the breath test did not render the result of the subsequent Intoximeter test at the police station and arrest unlawful.
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DPP v Kennedy [Qbd, 24/10/2003]
...was open to the justices to find that what was being used was not a device of the approved type. In Director of Public Prosecutions v Kay [1999] RTR 109, decided after the change in the law and despite what had been said in Carey, the justices accepted that the roadside breath test was viti......
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Table of Cases
...DPP v [2006] EWHC 2634 (Admin), DC! 216 .................................................................... Kay (John), DPP v [1999] RTR 109, DC! 4 ............................... Kelly v Hogan [1982] RTR 352, [1982] Crim LR 507, QBD! 411 .........................................................
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The Requirement to Provide Specimens
...sustained.” The answers to the questions were “yes”. Appeal dismissed. 3 CHAPTER 1: THE REQUIREMENT TO PROVIDE SPECIMENS DPP v Kay (John) [1999] RTR 109, 4 March 1998, QBD (DC) The officer at the roadside is under no duty to ask when the motorist last drank or smoked. On the facts of this ......
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‘Interactive Communication’ and Driving—Does It Matter Whether It Is a Mobile or Camera? Director of Public Prosecutions v Ramsey Barreto [2019] EWHC 2044 (Admin)
...when he or she sees one’ (Smith at [9]). It is also interesting to contrast the approach inBarreto to drunk driving in DPP v Kay [1999] RTR 109 where the Divisional Court held that ‘parliamentenacted the provisions in the Act of 1988 in their present form precisely to avoid motorists who we......