Woman Driver Nearly 10 Times Over Limit
Tuesday May 4, 3:35 PM
A woman who gave what is thought to be Britain’s highest breath-test
reading of nearly 10 times the limit has been sentenced to a total of
four months in jail – but told she would serve only half that period.
Motorist Michelle Fothergill’s reading showed 333 micrograms per 100
millilitres of breath against the legalmaximum of 35 micrograms when she
was stopped by police, Morley magistrates sitting in Leeds were told.
Fothergill, 24, from Tennyson Street, Morley, West Yorkshire, had so
much alcohol in her body that her solicitor, Roger Clapham, admitted: “In
theory she should be dead.”
Magistrates heard that officers noticed Fothergill driving her Ford
Escort at 60mph in a 40mph stretch of the A653 in Tingley, West
Yorkshire, shortly after midnight on November 16, 1998. They said she was
also driving erratically, clipping the kerb and driving on the wrong side
of the road.
When challenged, she spoke incoherently and had to be helped out of
her car. Subsequently she fell over. Passing sentence, magistrates’
chairman Mrs Sandra Westwood said: “We feel that the offence is so
serious that a prison sentence is the only way of dealing with you.”
Fothergill was given a three-month sentence for driving while unfit to do
so and a further month, to run consecutively, for a second charge of
stealing from her employer while on bail for the driving offence.
Magistrates ordered that two months of the four-month sentence should
be suspended. They also banned her from driving for two years.
