War on speed cameras that drove my wife potty!
Enraged by an ‘unfair’ £100 speeding fine, Richard spent £30,000 of his sons’ inheritance appealing it ... and losing. But that wasn’t the only penalty...
SOME have marvelled at his tenacity in the face of what they regard as a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Others have called him a fool.
An old friend even told him that she’d divorce him if he were her husband.
Richard Keedwell’s crime? The 71-year-old retired engineer has spent nearly three years, attended seven court hearings and spent £30,000 of his sons’ inheritance unsuccessfully disputing a £100 speeding fine.
No wonder his wife is ‘bloody furious’. It’s not as if he is a old-boy racer. He was clocked by a GATSO speed camera doing 35.79mph in a 30mph zone during an early Christmas shopping trip in Worcester in 2016.
When Richard and I meet, it is not chez Keedwell in Yate, Bristol, but in a pub on a business park miles from his neat four-bedroomed home where the atmosphere is extremely frosty and all talk of speeding is strictly off limits.
In fact, his wife of 47 years is so cross he doesn’t dare give me her name.
‘The money could have gone on other things that now we’ll have to do without — like a nice holiday or work around the house,’ he says, sheepishly. ‘It could have gone to the boys. My wife would have liked to have given it to a donkey sanctuary in Dorset. She’s very into donkeys...’
Instead, Richard got rather swept away with things and £30,000 went on lawyers, expert witnesses, site visits and other legal expenses. So instead of his wife, today he is flanked by Roger and Peter Glastonbury, 67, a pair of jolly identical twins otherwise known as the ‘GATSO Warriors’, who are here to support him.
They have helped 138 drivers in similar situations and got all bar three of them off. ‘Thousands of innocent motorists have been convicted when they haven’t been speeding,’ says Roger, an engineer who used to work for NASA and now runs a building renovations company.
Ever since he spent £44,000 himself having a wrongful GATSO charge of speeding at 91mph on a dual carriageway successfully overturned, Roger and his brother have spent thousands of hours and an awful lot of their own money helping other drivers in similar distress. ‘Together, we’re the Three Musketeers — the fighters for justice!’ says Richard, banging his lime and soda down with gusto.
Sadly, this time, things haven’t quite gone to plan.
It all started on Friday, November 30, 2016, when Richard — a large, gentle man who with his band The Falcons plays his sixstring guitar in care homes — and his wife were looking for a parking space in Worcester.
Without them realising, their Nissan Qashqai was clocked by the GATSO camera and, a couple of days later an NIP ( Notice of Impending Prosecution) landed on their door mat.
It wasn’t Richard’s first driving violation. He’s had several speeding tickets, once drove into a green council vehicle unhelpfully camouflaged against some other greenery and, ages ago, was caught a couple of times running a red light at the end of the M42 in Bristol. ‘It was in the dead of night and difficult to brake quickly,’ he says.
UNTIL now, he has always been happy to pay up. But this time was different. ‘ Of course my car doesn’t have a Tachograph and I don’t drive along staring at the speedometer, but I didn’t feel I was speeding,’ he says.
Instead of coughing up the £105 and moving on, he called Roger Glastonbury, who had knocked on his door several months earlier selling home improvements and told him about his crusade against faulty GATSO cameras.
Roger duly put him in touch with radar expert Tim Farrow, who analysed photos of the incident and concluded there could have been a camera malfunction known as the ‘double Doppler effect’.
This occurs when a camera’s radar measuring a passing car’s speed deflects on to a second vehicle travelling in the same direction.
(Later, by phone, Farrow, a former RAF electronics expert, tells me: ‘I had no doubt whatsoever. Not the slightest doubt at all that the return that caused the speed calculation did not come directly from Richard’s vehicle.’)
Farrow had successfully used the argument in another speeding case when a van driver was recorded doing 85mph in a 30mph zone. He proved he was driving at 29.08mph.
Meanwhile, Richard had been convicted without his knowledge and ordered to pay a now £220 fine, £ 30 victim surcharge and £ 85 court costs.
‘It was the thin end of wedge. Look at Stephen Lawrence’s family! They were fobbed off. What about the Birmingham Six? What happened there then? I knew I was innocent and I had to fight it.’
His wife, meanwhile, was rather less gung-ho. ‘But in the end she kind of said: “Go on, if you must, you must.” But we didn’t argue about it. She’s very long-suffering. ‘I had a budget of £5,000 in mind — just enough to give Tim a chance to give it is his best in the name of justice,’ he says. ‘ But things started going wrong.’
Richard’s costs spiralled — there were what sounds like a catalogue of errors on the part of the court and the Crown Prosecution Service, including two cancelled hearings and a dispute over police evidence.
He motored past his original £5,000 budget in November 2017, and on it went. ‘ The trouble is, where do you jump off?’ he says.
‘It went over £10,000 and then £20,000 — to be honest it’s a bit like being a gambler. Do you just chuck your hand in, or press on?’
Richard chose the latter — burning through money for future holidays, donkey sanctuary donations and — much to their annoyance — his three sons’ inheritance.
He says the eldest thinks he’s mad and asked: ‘Why are you doing this, why are you bothering?’
Richard told him: ‘ It’s like anybody fighting something: sometimes you have to stand up and be counted. But I don’t get much sympathy.’ In part, I suspect, he fought on because it had become a bit of an obsession.
Today, he is armed with a vast lever-arch file, can quote great rafts of correspondence verbatim and admits he will miss the case when he has finally exhausted all avenues.
There have, of course, been some low moments. ‘It’s been hard,’ says Richard. ‘It affected my sleep and it made me anxious. My family are NOT happy — they hate the fact I am in the news as much as the loss of money.’
HE’S also gone off driving. ‘I used to love it, but it’s a nightmare these days,’ he says. ‘The other day, a really aggressive driver undertook me and, when I got to the traffic lights to give him a nasty look, he had one hand on the wheel and a cup of coffee in the other.
‘That’s the sort of person who should be taken to court!’
Given all he’s been through, it must have been a serious blow when, on September 9, his second appeal was rejected and Richard found himself more than £30,000 out of pocket.
‘I fought the law and the law won,’ he says sadly. ‘I now have no faith in the justice system.’
There are, though, a couple of silver linings. Amazingly, he insists that his wife, while thoroughly fed up with the whole business, has never once said, ‘I told you so’.
His pension pot is still intact — ‘this money came out of a couple of windfalls I’d had’.
And his sons insist they can make their own way in the world without his money.
Most of all, he is proud that his case has drawn attention to the fallibility of speed camera ‘evidence’. He brightens up and adds: ‘And, by the way, we still think we’ve got a brilliant case. It’s only two courts of law that have decided it isn’t.
‘If we could just get in front of a crown court judge who understands law, not some half-wit of a district judge.’
Cue much animated chat about ordering judgment transcripts, dodgy evidence and possible perjury proceedings.
‘I just need a bit more funding. If anyone’s willing to fund it, I’d gladly give them a run for their money.’
Oh dear. Whether right or wrong, I fear for Richard, his wife, his sons and his pension pot.
And, finally, the inevitable £30,000 question: if he could turn the clock right back — to when that speeding fine landed on his door mat nearly three years ago — what would he do?
‘I’ve got to be honest — I’d just pay the bloody fine!’ he says.