Acting Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Kulandra Ratneser said that outstanding parking ticket fines that were owed by prosecutors in his office had been paid off by last night.

A story this week in The Royal Gazette revealed that a Crown counsel within the DPP is the worst offender on the Island when it comes to the non-payment of parking fines.

Mr. Ratneser said he had seen to it that any outstanding parking fines owed by prosecutors were paid off by the end of yesterday ?to the satisfaction of my office?.

But he said prosecutors were far from the only fine dodgers, and pointed out that the list of 30 of the worst offenders on the Island included defence lawyers and other members of the community.

He added that a ?mitigating factor? to be taken into account was the fact that those prosecutors who did receive parking tickets usually got them while carrying out their official functions.

?The situation seems to be that all these prosecutors were given the tickets when they were parked outside court during working hours. There is no other parking available.?

Mr. Ratneser also called for a change in the law on parking tickets in order to streamline the process of paying fines.

Explaining why there had not been prosecutions for failure to pay parking tickets since February, 2002, Mr. Ratneser said there had been a ?backlog? of cases because current legislation required summons? to be served on each offender in order to bring them into court. ?Because of the volume of parking tickets, it became humanly impossible to have a Magistrate sitting in his office signing 200 summonses a day. It became more and more difficult.?

He said the law should be changed so that a summons is issued when the parking ticket is first written out.

?That is how it is done in other countries I believe. That?s the way it should be. The parking ticket should itself be the summons so that there are no other documents involved.?

The issuing of a summons at the same time as the ticket would mean that the prosecution process is begun when the person finds the ticket on his car windscreen or cycle handlebars.

With the Criminal Code stating that summary offences committed more than six months earlier cannot be prosecuted, such a change would also deal with the problem of out of date parking tickets. In 1997, Magistrate Edward King made headlines when he threw out a number of parking fine cases because they were too old.

Although the Attorney General at the time, Elliott Mottley, pledged to appeal the decision, that appeal was withdrawn at the last minute. Thus, the problem of parking ticket backlogs has reared its head again after nearly seven years.

wishes to make it clear that a file photo of traffic warden Marion Madeiros published with Tuesday?s story on unpaid parking fines was a file photo, used for purely illustrative purposes.

Mrs. Madeiros had no connection with the story.