Jonty Parkes was celebrating his 18th birthday in Queenstown when he realised his car was in a 30-minute park.<\/p>\n
A quick decision to move it to a long-term spot overnight would prove costly.<\/p>\n
Parkes was stopped by police and breath-tested after making it just 10m down the road.<\/p>\n
He failed, blowing 864 micrograms of alcohol per litre of breath, and was charged with\u00a0driving with excess breath alcohol.<\/p>\n
After his birthday trip in April, Parkes, of Te Awamutu, spent more than $3000 on flights and accommodation to return to\u00a0Queenstown\u00a0to appear in the district court and face the charge.<\/p>\n
This week, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced by Community Magistrate Elder Robati.<\/p>\n
At the hearing, Robati referred to the summary of facts, which stated Parkes was stopped by police just before 1.30am on April 10.<\/p>\n
While the breath test revealed he was more than three times the adult legal limit, because Parkes was under 20, he was subject to a zero alcohol limit.<\/p>\n
“You stated it was your birthday and you did not think you\u2019d blow this high,” Robati said.<\/p>\n
Defence lawyer Megan Waller told the court that Parkes had been visiting his girlfriend in Queenstown.<\/p>\n
While celebrating his birthday, he had been trying to avoid a fine when he moved his Mazda.<\/p>\n
Waller said Parkes has had to fork out thousands to return to the area to appear in court.<\/p>\n
He was then fined $700 and disqualified from driving for 28 days.<\/p>\n
He would then need to apply for an interlock device for 12 months, and a zero alcohol licence for three years would follow.<\/p>\n
\u00a0– Brianna McIlraith, Open Justice reporter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jonty Parkes was celebrating his 18th birthday in Queenstown when he realised his car was in a 30-minute…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-397596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}