Yorke scores legal victory as speeding fine is overturned

BRITISH soccer star Dwight Yorke yesterday scored a legal victory when the High Court overturned a speeding fine.

A judge ruled the Blackburn Rovers striker's conviction must be quashed because there was evidence he did not "personally" fill in an official form relied on by the police to show he was the driver of a vehicle caught speeding.

Mr Justice Owen, sitting in London, said magistrates had established a prime facie case against Yorke on an "erroneous basis".

The ex-Manchester United player was fined 500 and ordered to pay 1,425 court costs by Manchester city magistrates after the 31-year-old's Porsche turbo was clocked doing 61 mph in Princess Road, Withington, where there was a 40 mph limit, in May 2001.

In his ruling, the judge acknowledged that the case was of wide importance "given the prevalence of the use of laser and photographic technology to check the speed of motor vehicles".

Yorke, then living at Alderley Edge, Cheshire, was alleged to have partially filled in the form and returned it to the central ticket office in Manchester in July 2001, although it did not contain his signature.

The law requires the owner or keeper of a vehicle to give information on the form identifying the driver when a vehicle is allegedly caught speeding.

The judge said it was being argued that if a person put on the form "the information requested" the driver's number, name and address, date of birth and occupation that discharged his obligations under section 172 of the 1988 Road Traffic Act, and he was not committing an offence if he did not sign the form.

The judge said there appeared to be "widespread knowledge" which was spreading "like a virus" that an unsigned form was inadmissible as evidence, and this might be making it possible to escape a speeding conviction by not signing. However, he ruled an unsigned form was admissible as "evidence of a confession" if it could properly be inferred the form "is completed by a defendant".

The judge said Yorke had won his appeal only because of the possibility his form "had been completed by another" and he was not given the opportunity to challenge its admissibility on that basis. Such a challenge would "inevitably have succeeded" because of the evidence that the form had in fact been filled in by Yorke's agent.