Oz woman let off for drink driving over lack of public transport!

MELBOURNE - A woman in Australia has been acquitted of a drink driving charge because she lives in an area where there is no public transport.

Jasmin Clair Henley, 27, had recorded a blood-alcohol reading of 0.067 after police stopped her on the Cahill Expressway last month.

She told officers she had two glasses of wine over dinner in Paddington with colleagues.

Henley had her low-range drink driving charge dismissed without conviction, after the Downing Centre Local Court magistrate found she had no viable alternative to get back to her home at Cattai, north of Windsor, in Sydney’s west.

“If she lived in any other suburb around Sydney . . . like Paddington . . . there’s no way on earth I would consider dismissing the charge,” the Courier Mail quoted magistrate Brian Maloney as saying.

Maloney said he would treat the case as if he was passing sentence in a country court, because there were not enough public transport options open to people living in the northwest corridor.

“It’s not like she could jump on a 333 bus to Bondi,” he said.

The magistrate noted that Henley claimed to have only had two drinks at the work function, held at the London Hotel, but he warned that alcohol could be “biased” in effecting women more than men due to their generally smaller body mass. (ANI)