ABSTRACT
It may not be instantly obvious why the two offences of drink-driving and speeding should be placed together in one chapter. On the one hand drink-driving stands out as the one driving offence that carries with it a degree of stigma usually attached to more paradigmatic criminal offences. Speeding, on the other hand, is a far more accepted practice, hardly deemed to be a criminal offence at all in the eyes of even the most respectable ‘law-abiding’ citizen. That these attitudes prevail is in itself interesting, and is an issue that will be addressed throughout the chapter, with reference to research conducted by psychologists and criminologists, and one that will be returned to in Chapters 6 and 7. However, whilst the popular view is that these offences are completely diverse, from a legal perspective there is much to compare them. Both are ‘strict liability’ offences requiring no proof of mens rea, even in the form of negligence, as is required in relation to the offences discussed in Chapter 2. Both offences, instead of relying on proof of the driver’s standard of driving, instead usually rely on technological devices to provide evidence of a particular state of affairs: either that the defendant had alcohol or drugs in his or her body, or that the vehicle was driven at a speed above a particular limit.
