Magistrate and teacher wife disguise car in attempt to evade speeding fine

A magistrate and his teacher wife attempted to disguise their car and changed the number plates in a bid to avoid a £60 speeding fine, a court heard. Michael Rodger and his wife Diane removed stickers from the windscreen of their Skoda and told police the car must have been cloned.

Mr Rodger, a deputy church warden, wrote five letters to police in protest at the fine, claiming alternately that the car had been parked at the time and then that police photographs were too unclear to identify the driver. They sent their own pictures of the altered car to officers in an attempt to show it did not look the same.

In each letter sent, the 43-year-old added the letters JP - Justice of the Peace - after his name.

But the couple's attempts to evade justice backfired spectacularly when police officers visited their home and immediately recognised Mrs Rodger and her daughter. Instead of a £60 fine and three points off her licence, Mrs Rodger and her husband were told to pay £5,000 costs and narrowly escaped jail for perverting the course of justice.

Passing sentence at Derby Crown Court, Judge David Brumming gave both a six month jail term, suspended for two years, and ordered them to carry out 300 hours of unpaid work. "It is almost beyond belief that you should have done what you did," he told the weeping church-going couple. "You embarked on a course of dishonesty to escape this small penalty.

"Between you, you cooked up five letters and persisted in your claim that your car had been cloned and you were not responsible. Given your family background and faith, it was an extraordinary and staggeringly stupid decision that has led to disgrace for you both and put your jobs and livelihood at risk."