Worried about speeding and getting arrested for it?
Apparently, the police may have been abusing the law by arresting and penalising anyone they deem to have been speeding.
The law is on your side on this one.
Traffic police have been harassing motorists driving above the 100 km/h limit but the High Court has ruled that driving 20 km/h above that limit is not illegal.
The court has also ruled that there is no law allowing the highways authority to place speed limit road signs or prescribe punishment for ignoring them.
Ankush Manoj Shah had been charged before a Magistrate’s Court after he ignored the speed limit indicated on a sign along the Southern Bypass Road between Kikuyu and Kiambu.
According to the charge, Shah was driving at 120 km/h instead of 100 km/h. But before he took the plea, Shah’s lawyer Allen Gichuhi raised questions over the charge.
Gichuhi termed the charge defective as the traffic law gives a driver at least a 20 km/h allowance from the set speed.
“Since the applicant had not exceeded the 20 km/h allowance, no offence had been committed and the charge was, therefore, defective as the applicant was charged with a non-existent offence,” he submitted.
The lower court dismissed the objection but Shah appealed to the High Court.
In the ruling, Judge Ngenye Macharia found that section 70 (5b) (1A) does not exist in law.
With this, drivers can now argue their innocence if driving at 120km/h as the judge found that the limit is allowed by the law.
The judge noted that section 70 (5A), which allows the 20 km/h excess speed does not spell out an offence although it gives a penalty for speeding.
“From the above, one observation is that section 70 (5B) (1A) on one hand does not exist. On the other hand, section 70 (5A) on its own does not disclose an offence since it only prescribes a penalty for a conviction in violation of the speed limit,” said Justice Macharia.
Shah wanted Macharia to declare that all drivers fined or charged under the contested section were illegally punished. The judge said there was no evidence before him so he could not deal with that.
“I must emphasise that the applicant having been charged for driving at 120 km/h and the law cited, an offence could only have been created if he was driving in excess of 120 km/h. He was therefore within the allowed speed limit. Effectively no offence had been committed by the speed he was driving at.”
This then was a defective charge, “Reference to sub-section 1 A refers to the placement of traffic signs prescribing speed limits. Thus when considered as a whole, no offence is revealed under provisions of the law cited.”