Face of Nation : Like many a bad story, Yoshnika Shah’s tale of woe begins on a dark and stormy night. Nearly three years later, it’s still not over. But the clouds have parted a little.
What began with a rollover on B.C.’s most notorious stretch of highway in December 2015 has turned into an odyssey of legal indignity for the 29-year-old.
Shah claimed she was handed a ticket for speeding and driving without a licence while she lay unconscious in a hospital bed.
A court registry employee wouldn’t let her file evidence when she tried to dispute the ticket — a dispute she then lost because she didn’t file any evidence.
And she lost an appeal of that decision because she didn’t understand the justice system. Finally — this week — Shah found a judge to listen.
“Ms. Shah was entitled to put her entire case before [the judge] at the time he reviewed her application to dispute the ticket,” Madam Justice Wendy Baker wrote in her decision.
“It is clear … that her inability to put the full record before him did impact his decision making.”
Baker’s reasons for judgment are brief, but the case highlights the difficulties facing self-represented litigants as they negotiate British Columbia’s overburdened court system. Even heartfelt arguments can fail if they don’t meet procedural requirements.
Shah — a teacher who came to Canada from India — has filed dozens of pages of “exhibits” in B.C. Supreme Court in her bid to clear her name.
She sought a crash report from Toyota to prove she was driving under the speed limit at the time of the accident. And she tried to file documentary evidence showing she held an international driver’s licence. She claimed that proving her innocence was crucial to both her credit rating and her ability to find work.
“Kindly accept my file,” she wrote the court in February 2018 in a letter in which she described herself as “a highly educated girl.”
“Please consider this affidavit and petition so I can get my life back on track and live a normal life that I deserve.”
According to documents filed in the case, Shah was driving to Kamloops on Dec. 3, 2015 when her car went off the road. She claimed there were four other accidents that night.
The speed limit was 110 km/h but Shah claimed her Toyota crash diagnostics showed that she was driving 75 km/h or less at the time of the accident. She was taken to hospital in Kamloops with a skull fracture, memory loss and “raccoon eyes.”
Shah claimed she was in intensive care and that when she woke up, a nurse handed her a ticket for speeding and driving without a licence. “It is unsigned, which indicates Ms. Shah was unconscious while it was being issued,” she wrote.
Shah claimed she had no family and no choice but to return to Mumbai two days after her release from hospital to recover with her parents. But as a result, she missed the 30-day window to dispute the ticket and was deemed to have pleaded guilty.
