UK Law Articles
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The Times
November 19 1998
Go-ahead for claims by fine defaulters
BY FRANCES GIBB, LEGAL CORRESPONDENT
HUNDREDS of fine defaulters won the go-ahead in the High Court yesterday to begin compensation claims against magistrates who unlawfully jailed them.
The court outlined errors made by magistrates' courts all over the country in thousands of cases when dealing with fine defaulters. Many were jailed; the higher courts subsequently held they should not have been.
Despite messages sent by Parliament over the past 20 years, Lord Justice Brooke said, magistrates had failed to treat jail as a "last resort". The court's decision to overturn jail terms imposed on six fine defaulters - three of them single mothers and one owing only £10 - clears the way for hundreds to claim compensation for unlawful imprisonment. Richard Wise, a lawyer who with his brother, Ian, has handled many of the cases, said that he was already dealing with 500 claims.
Lord Justice Brooke said it had been estimated that an average of 22,500 fine defaulters were jailed each year by magistrates between 1992 and 1995. That has fallen to 8,500 a year in the wake of criticisms of JPs by the higher courts.
Mr Wise's West Midlands firm, HMB Law, had been at the forefront of the battle to free unlawfully jailed defaulters and had fought numerous cases through the courts.
In some cases magistrates had sent defaulters aged under 21 to prison - when the law specifically stated they should be sent only to young offenders' institutions - and prison authorities had "turned a Nelsonian blind eye" when accepting them into custody.
The judge added: "People were being locked up when they should not have been and some enterprising prison establishments have been examining justices' warrants very carefully on receiving fine defaulters."
The judge, sitting with Mr Justice Sedley, said there were many ways of dealing with fine defaulters - including attachment of earnings orders and fine supervision orders - and every method of enforcement had to have been tried without success before a jail term was justified.
