A woman was pictured driving away from the court only minutes after a judge banned her from the road for two years.
Simara Knopka, 39, headed the wrong way down a motorway and crashed head-on with another car on May 28 this year.
She was disqualified from driving at a trial at Manchester Crown Court but the mother, who has never passed a driving test or held a valid licence in the United Kingdom, was pictured behind the wheel as she left court.
She initially appeared to sit in the passenger seat of the car, before moving over to the driver’s seat and pulling out of a car park.
Simara Knopka, from Macclesfield, was spared jail by a judge who said he could punish her in the community instead.
The defendant, who is originally from Brazil and speaks Portuguese, was told numerous times in court she’d been banned from driving.
A Portuguese interpreter translated the information for her but the housekeeper appeared to drive while disqualified moments later.
The court was informed of how she visited a friend and consumed two glasses of wine before driving home at about 1.10 am on May 28.
She was driving her son’s Nissan Micra and only had a provisional UK driving licence.
Knopka learnt to drive in Brazil 17 years ago before moving to the United Kingdom three and a half years ago.
A judge heard she’d been taking driving lessons in the United Kingdom but had not passed a test.
On the morning of the incident, she used Google Maps on her phone to direct her home and joined the M60 at junction 15 on the wrong side of the road. This led to a head-on collision with another motorist who was leaving the motorway on the exit slip road.
Prosecutor Neil Ronan told the court how the collision caused the other driver’s car to flip over onto its roof and by the time police attended, ambulance crews were present but mercifully, it would appear that the other driver was relatively unscathed by the incident.
He said he was driving home from Manchester and took the exit to Bolton and immediately after joining saw the lights of the defendant’s Micra coming towards him. He said it was dark but said that the weather conditions were good and the defendant seemed to be straddling the middle two lanes.
Simara Knopka seems to think that it’s her right to do as she pleases and now appears to be laughing in the face of our justice system, but it now seems like that this woman needs some jail time to make her realise that she can’t do as she pleases – this woman could have caused an extremely nasty accident where someone could have been killed.
And why was she not immediately apprehended for going against the court’s decision? And did she not realise that a ban is instant or was she just disregarding the law? Maybe she thought that Big Brother (TV) was watching her.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 