Patrick John Sikorski v Peter Gritsch

The appeal in Patrick John Sikorski v Peter Gritsch was heard in the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. The appellant, Patrick Sikorski, appealed against his conviction in the Magistrates Court, where he was found guilty of driving with a blood alcohol level exceeding the prescribed limit. The conviction was based on an information that Sikorski drove a motor vehicle in a public place with a blood alcohol concentration of 4 or more on 14 June 2001. The only issue argued in the appeal was whether the Magistrate should have found that Sikorski was the driver of the vehicle at the relevant time. The appeal was brought pursuant to Part 11 of the Magistrates Court Act 1930, which allows for a re-hearing on the evidence before the Magistrate.

The court considered the conflicting evidence presented by the witnesses, including the accounts of Belinda Rogers, Lindsay Murphy, and Alan Muggridge. The court found that the Magistrate had accepted the evidence of all three witnesses and attempted to reconcile the differences by a hypothesis that Muggridge drove the appellant to the camping area at an earlier stage during the afternoon, leaving sufficient time for someone to drive the vehicle back to a position outside Rogers' caravan, without her or Murphy noticing either the absence of the vehicle or its return. However, the court found this hypothesis to be substantially more unlikely than the hypothesis that neither Rogers nor Murphy noticed all that went on outside the caravan that afternoon and failed to see Muggridge get into the car and drive off towards the camping area, by which stage the appellant was inside the vehicle, possibly lying on the passenger seat unseen.

Furthermore, the court found another difficulty in relation to the time in which Sikorski is alleged to have driven the car and the time at which it was established that his blood sample contained an excessive quantity of alcohol. The court found that it was incumbent on the prosecution to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Sikorski had been the driver of the vehicle in a public place and the time at which he ceased to be the driver of the vehicle. However, the evidence was not clear enough for it to be found established beyond reasonable doubt that the test was administered during the "relevant period."

For these reasons, the appeal was allowed, the conviction set aside, and the information dismissed. The respondent was ordered to pay the appellant's costs of the appeal and in the Magistrates Court.