A Vancouver man ticketed for riding a one-wheel electric skateboard without insurance has had his conviction overturned after the B.C. Supreme Court found the original judge had carried out a “miscarriage of justice.”
Michael Justin Advincula had been riding his skateboard along West Waterfront Road in Vancouver when a police officer ticketed him. He disputed the case, but after a brief trial, lost and was ordered by the traffic court judge to pay a $568 fine.
Advincula appealed his conviction to the B.C. Supreme Court on two fronts: procedural fairness, arguing bias, and the inherent unfairness of being ticketed for an uninsured device when insurance is impossible to obtain.
Supreme Court Justice Douglas Thompson was not convinced by Advincula’s procedural fairness arguments. But when Thompson looked into the history of the presiding traffic court judge, he found “a significant omission at the start of the trial that infected the fairness of the hearing.”
Six months before Advincula’s first trial, the presiding judge had overseen a similar case involving the operation of an electric unicycle.
In that case, the judicial justice had intervened immediately, telling the court his mind was biased after he had been hit twice by skateboarders while on a sidewalk. In one case, the judge received a concussion, and suffered persistent vertigo, which forced him to give up hiking, “one of his passions,” noted Thompson in his ruling.
“The judicial justice said that four months later he was struck by another skateboarder and suffered multiple fractures, and was bedridden for months,” wrote Thompson.
The traffic judge told the unicyclist that he was “not a good person to hear a case like this” and later recused himself from the case.
The same police officer ticketed the unicyclist and Advincula. Having seen the judge recuse himself once, the officer raised the prospect of potential bias. But the judge indicated he was prepared to carry on with Advincula’s trial.
“The trial was procedurally unfair to a fundamental degree,” wrote Thompson. “I am satisfied there was a miscarriage of justice.”
In allowing the appeal, Thompson did not rule on arguments made around insurance.
The judge set aside Advincula’s conviction and ordered a new trial.
