Traffic Offences, Criminal Offences and Mistake of Fact 

When you commit a serious traffic offence or criminal traffic offence you may be investigated, the police may try to interview you and then finally issue you with a Court Attendance Notice. 

At the earliest possible time you should to engage a lawyer for the best result. 

In many respects Traffic offences are the same as regular Criminal offences, however many traffic offences are strict liability, which means the prosecution does not have to prove you intended to do the offence, meaning you are defacto guilty unless you can prove that you did not commit the act or omission (failing to act) which caused the offence. 

A typical not guilty defence for something that was not your act would be having an unexpected heart attack or unexpected seizure. Or perhaps your car or motorcycle has malfunctioned such as a jammed accelerator,  tyre failure, gearbox failure, engine failure, brake failure, hitting a pot hole or having a passenger interfering with your driving causing the car to veer off course. 

You cannot argue whether you intentionally committed the offence with strict liability traffic matters but you can argue mistake of fact. This is when you are reasonably mistaken as to the facts of a major issue that has caused the incident. This gives you an opportunity to test the prosecution case against you by pleading not guilty and it gives you the opportunity to explain something that may be inherently unfair, such as the failure to display or incorrectly displayed sign post with a lower speed. 

Perhaps you have never received a licence suspension notice only to find that the police want to charge you with driving whilst disqualified. If there is a reasonable argument that you have been honestly mistaken this gives you the ability to plead not guilty dropping the case against you.  

You cannot use ignorance of the law as an excuse but you can be reasonably mistaken and sometimes the law can be so confusing or contradictory that the result can swing in your favour.

The justice system needs to accept when people were honestly and reasonably mistaken because this can and does happen for valid reason. for example:

Jack,18, met Jill in a nightclub, Jill represented herself as 18 but she was in fact 15 and 11 months of age. At a later stage in the night they had consensual sex, but the law does not give Jill the ability to consent at this age. 

Without the ability to argue mistake of fact Jack would be a convicted and registered sex offender for the rest of his life.