avtur3 wrote:The offence was 41mph in a 30 limit, hardly a flogging offence, why on earth put everything at risk for such a trivial (in the scheme of things) offence. Something doesn't add up.
Possible thread drift....
In my old day job we used to get very similar. Get caught without a train ticket, and say that you forgot to buy one, you'd get a modest penalty fare and sent on your way. Try to manipulate the system by buying a ticket for one or two stops of your journey, but not the whole journey, get prosecuted for fraud and get a criminal record. Plenty of respectable professionals taken through the process, many absolutely horrified to discover they'd be getting a criminal record.
There's an interesting observation: most people would regard shoplifting as theft and wrong; but stealing a train journey is regarded as 'exploiting a loop hole' . I wonder if there was a similar mindset in play here - the 'loophole where you claim someone else was driving'.