A SENIOR doctor pleaded guilty to drink-driving after 45 court appearances in more than five years in a case that the judge said could qualify for the record books.

Danielle Freedman, 52, an associate medical director of the Luton and Dunstable NHS Trust, was stopped by police in November 2000 but her lawyer said yesterday that she had fought the case until now because of uncertainties in the law.

After her guilty plea, District Judge Geoffrey Wicks said: “If The Guinness Book of Records was interested in such things, I cannot conceive that there has ever been a summary matter in the magistrates’ court where a guilty plea has come in the sixth year of proceedings.”

Dr Freedman, from Harpenden, Hertfordshire, was stopped by police at 1.15am on November 5, 2000, after they saw her at the head of a procession of cars outside Hatfield, driving at 15mph. She then drove her BMW around a roundabout before pulling into a side road and swerving. Freedman told police that she had drunk two glasses of wine at a party. A breath test taken at Hatfield police station showed that she had 87 milligrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of breath. The legal limit is 35 milligrammes. She was retested six hours later and found still to be over the limit.

Since then her case has hinged on the possibility that the breathalyser device, the Intoximeter EC/IR, may have provided an inaccurate reading.

Concerns about the breathalyser were raised in 2000 when specialists found that it provided results that were too high.

However, the Home Office denies that the machine was inaccurate. A series of complicated legal wrangles regarding the disclosure of information about the machine in cases similar to Freedman’s have led several cases to be scrapped.

Last Thursday Lord Justice Brooke, sitting in the High Court, ruled that, in two drink-drive cases, proceedings should not have been halted after Intoximeter officials refused to hand over information about their machines, claiming that it was confidential.

Robin Falvey, Freedman’s solicitor, had argued that his client could not be guaranteed a fair trial because the Crown had failed to provide information about the working of the Intoximeter.

After the judgment by Lord Justice Brooke, Mr Falvey advised Freedman to rethink her denial of the charge. He said that his client’s case had dragged on for so long because of uncertainty about the law involving disclosure of information.

District Judge Wicks said that Freedman had been motivated by a genuine belief that she had a defence and was seeking an acquittal on proper legal advice.

He ordered her to pay a £450 fine and £2,000 in court costs and disqualified her from driving for 12 months.

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