A man who took his fight against an $80 speeding ticket all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost at nearly every turn, racked up $34,000 in legal fees and was declared bankrupt when he couldn’t pay them.<\/p>\n
Peter Prescott has now failed to have his bankruptcy annulled, and is liable to pay more legal fees to the New Zealand Police after another unsuccessful trip to court.<\/p>\n
In July 2016, Prescott was caught driving 64km\/h in a 50km\/h zone and was sent a ticket for it.<\/p>\n
However, he tried to claim he wasn’t driving the car, nor did he own it.<\/p>\n
When he didn’t pay the fine and the matter went to court, Prescott didn’t show up and he was fined a further $80 and $30 in court costs.<\/p>\n
Two years later, Prescott unsuccessfully appealed the fine in the District Court and rather than seek leave to appeal he sought a judicial review of that decision.<\/p>\n
That request for review was struck out and Prescott was ordered to pay nearly $7000 in court costs.<\/p>\n
Prescott tried unsuccessfully to have the High Court recall that judgement before making a bid to the Court of Appeal to stay the costs order.<\/p>\n
That was also dismissed and close to $6000 was added to his burgeoning debt.<\/p>\n
A further $2500 was added to the bill after Prescott tried and failed to get leave to apply to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
Prescott did have one small win in 2020 when he applied to the High Court to appeal the original District Court decision before applying to the High, Appeal and Supreme courts to recall earlier decisions to decline a judicial review.<\/p>\n
Then in December 2020 police served a bankruptcy notice on Prescott for failing to pay them close to $7000 in court costs.<\/p>\n
Prescott tried and failed to have this bankruptcy notice set aside and was ordered to pay a further $12,000 in costs.<\/p>\n
By September 2021 Prescott owed the police $27,000 and in 2022 he was declared bankrupt.<\/p>\n
Prescott appealed this, then tried to have the order suspended, then tried his hand at the Court of Appeal to have the order reversed. None of which were successful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A man who took his fight against an $80 speeding ticket all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost at nearly every turn, racked up $34,000 in legal fees and was declared bankrupt when he couldn’t pay them. Peter Prescott has now failed to have his bankruptcy annulled, and is liable to pay more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13289,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13287\/revisions\/13289"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}