The Supreme Court ruled that signing an intoxilyser statement in the wrong order does not, by itself, make it inadmissible in a drink-driving prosecution. Gerard Hogan J. said the Court of Appeal had correctly followed an earlier Supreme Court decision, but that the Supreme Court should now overturn that precedent and allow the appeal.
Robert Hodgins had been arrested on suspicion of drink driving and required to provide two breath specimens at a Garda station. The intoxilyser registered a “fail” result and produced two statements. The Garda and Mr Hodgins both signed them, but the Garda did not sign before requiring Mr Hodgins to do so. The parties accepted that this breached the required signing sequence under the Road Traffic Act 2010 and the 2015 regulations.
The question was whether that breach meant the statements were inadmissible. The Court of Appeal had excluded them, following the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Director of Public Prosecutions v Freeman. Hogan J. said Freeman should be overruled because it was clearly wrong: in his view, it had not engaged with earlier Supreme Court cases holding that technical errors do not invalidate statutory certificates where there is no more than harmless error.
Hogan J. considered the signing-order mistake harmless in this case. Both the Garda and Mr Hodgins had signed the statements, so he said the error did not undermine their authenticity. He distinguished a failure by the Garda to sign at all, which he described as a more serious error because an essential condition for authenticating the print-out would be missing.
Hogan J. concluded that the statutory certificate should be considered valid and said he would allow the appeal. The source is his judgment only; it does not include the operative order or the other judges’ reasons, so it does not establish the Court’s overall disposition beyond Hogan J.’s stated conclusion.