Drove home after drinking wine and vodka

Friday 29 May 2020

A 44-year-old chef chose to drive home from a friend's house "100 to 200 metres" away after an afternoon of drinking left him almost three times over the limit.

Rodrigo Pires narrowly avoided prison and has instead been sentenced to 80 hours of community service and banned from driving for three years.

Pires' driving raised alarm bells for a witness who was concerned about how a Skoda Fabia was being driven in Route de Picquerel at around 18:00 on Tuesday 26 May.

The vehicle reportedly "struggled" to turn left onto Route de L'Islet and came to a standstill, suggesting to the witness that Pires couldn't get the car into gear. 

After making it down the road, Pires parked at the Morrisons L'Islet car park and walked to his home nearby. Guernsey Police were called and went to the vehicle that was described to them.

The bonnet was warm to the touch, suggesting it had just been driven, and the officers went to Pires' house, where he failed a breath test.

He produced a lower reading of 96mcg per 100ml of breath. The legal limit is 35mcg. 

The distance that Pires drove was given as somewhere between 100m and 200m.

He had been to Waitrose at 11:00 that morning, where he bought wine and vodka, which he had been drinking with a friend at his friend's house before driving back to his own residence. 

Pires had no known previous offences.

In sentencing, Judge Graeme McKerrell said: "In this jurisdiction we treat drink driving seriously and if the reading is above a certain limit than a sentence of imprisonment is pretty much inevitable. Your reading was just short of that but it is still nevertheless very high and in my view a community service order would be more appropriate than a fine to mark the seriousness of the offence."

Pires was given 80 hours of community service and had his driving license suspended for three years.