A Slight Hitch

It would appear that there is no Spanish equivalent of the Probation Service. Consequently, when an offender is sentenced to community work, it falls to his/her local town hall to organise and supervise it. They must do so within twelve months of sentence being passed or it expires. The judges have just pointed out that the local town halls come up with very few jobs, so the majority of unlicenced drivers (and others) will probably never have to worry about that part of their sentence.

Unlicensed drivers

As from May 1st, the offence of driving without an appropriate licence has become imprisonable here in Spain. In the context that the average weekend sees around 20 deaths on Spain´s roads, half of them motorcyclists, something clearly needed to be done. The Traffic Division of the Guardia Civil set to with a will and so in the first few days of May a steady stream of (mainly young, male) offenders appeared before the court. So far I don´t believe a custodial sentence has been imposed, but hefty fines, coupled with community service are the order of the day. Thus an 18 year old was fined €2,000 and sentenced to 27 days of community working (about 160 hours by my reckoning). There was no pressure on the courts to constrain the fine within the offenders´ "ability to pay within a reasonable period".

Three of a kind (2)

Because driving without a licence usually comes to court as part of a set of three offences (no insurance and no MOT being the other two), it is not treated with the seriousness it deserves. That, at least, is my opinion.There are a number of considerations which combine to produce this result.
Firstly, where we are faced with multiple offences we have to put them into some kind of order of seriousness. No Insurance carries a recommendation that between 6 and 8 points should be endorsed on the licence; No Licence carries a recommendation of 3 to 6 points; No MOT is not an endorsable offence. So No Insurance is seen as the most serious and No MOT as the least.
Secondly, it is customary (I'm not sure it's obligatory) to impose points only for the most serious offence and to order a simple endorsement without points specified for other endorsable offences; so no points are imposed for No Licence.
Thirdly, two offences of No Insurance within three years will add at least 12 points to the licence. At 12 points the offender 'tots' and is then subject to a mandatory disqualification of at least 6 months the first time, 12 months the second and 18 months the third. So No Insurance very often leads to disqualification.
Fourthly, where a number of offences fall to be sentenced at the same time, each attracting a fine, then we are required to apply the so-called totality principle, which is that the total amount of fines and costs imposed must be within the offender's ability to pay within a reasonable period of time, taken to mean 12 months. Because No Insurance has been judged the most serious, this will attract the largest fine, the other fines being scaled down accordingly. The result is that the fine for No Licence tends to be lower than it should be.
The outcome is that the message sent out by the courts is that they don't view No Licence as particularly serious, which is not as it should be. For my solution, you'll have to await my next post, as this one is long enough already!