Lawless, Part Two

First it was food labelling laws that were being ignored. Now it seems that Bermudians don't need to bother with parking restrictions either.

Apparently over $600,000 worth of unpaid parking tickets are currently outstanding because prosecutors haven't brought a single offender to court since February 2002. Why is anyone's guess - even Acting Director of Public Prosecutions Kulandra Ratneser said he didn't know.

Hopefully it has nothing to do with the fact that a number of members of his staff, along with several of the Island's other lawyers, are the biggest offenders. According to the Gazette, Crown counsel Shadee Subair is the worst, with fines totalling more than $16,000 since 2001. Based on a $50 parking fine that means she must have received about one ticket every two days, a staggering accomplishment. Ms. Subair (who remarkably, could be reached for comment) didn't deny the claim, simply calling it "gossip" and "inaccurate".

Coming hot on the heels of the revelation that the police are currently unable to issue tickets to people who ignore the new seatbelt law, this does little to instill confidence in the effectiveness of law enforcement in Bermuda.

Currently only about 20% of the 30,000 parking tickets issued every year are not paid. After this story I imagine we'll see a lot more.

Comments

[Sean Poconill on 28.01.04 at 11:34]

The theory with parking tickets is to not pay them and wait for the reminder; most of the time the reminder never appears and you save yourself $50. Having had a number of tickets in my time I’ve found the hardest and most annoying part of the ticket situation is scraping the sticky leftovers off my windscreen. What ticket?

My first post, I’m sure there's many foreigners in Bda noding quietly.

[Jonathan on 28.01.04 at 17:28]

It is sounding a lot like you are actually living somewhere like Trinidad. It seems like every one of your recent posts deals with how contemptuous most Bermudians are of the laws - especially those who make them.

Once a banana republic....

[JJ on 28.01.04 at 20:12]

It is quite stunning how members of the Bermuda bar just caverlierly decide not to pay fines. Call me naive, but I sort of expect that people who work for the DPP are at least themselves law-abiding. How can they stand up in court to prosecute someone when they have such a blatant disrespect for the process? The mind boggles.