Crime author La Plante banned from driving despite emotional pleas

Lynda La Plante walked into Lavender Hill Magistrates' Court on Monday knowing the verdict was likely already written. The 83-year-old creator of Prime Suspect—one of television's most enduring crime dramas—had accumulated 24 points on her driving licence. The law was clear. But she came anyway with a plea: let me keep my car, or my life as a writer ends.

The offences were modest in their excess. Between November 2025 and April this year, La Plante had driven through a 20mph zone near her Kingston-upon-Thames home five times, each time a few miles over the limit. Twenty-four miles per hour. Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven. The speeds read almost like a countdown. She was heading to the same place each time: Roehampton Playing Fields, where she took her dog Theo for his daily walk.

This was not her first brush with the speed limit. In June 2023, she had accumulated three points. Then again in June and July 2025, she picked up more. By the time she entered the courtroom, the total had reached 24—the threshold at which a driving ban becomes mandatory. She pleaded guilty to all five recent violations. There was no dispute about what she had done.

What mattered, La Plante believed, was why she needed to keep driving. She told the court that her car was essential to her work as a crime writer—that meeting sources and criminals for research required mobility. But the emotional core of her argument lay elsewhere. Theo, she explained, was not simply a pet. After her previous dog Hugo died unexpectedly, she had been devastated. "I lost it," she said, her voice breaking. "I didn't know what to do with my life." Theo had pulled her through that grief. Without the ability to drive him to his walks, she would have to rehome him. And that loss, she believed, would destroy her capacity to write. "It's very, very solitary and I work exceptionally hard," she told the magistrate. "I would just stop."

Magistrate Mandy Lamplough listened. But the law has a specific test for such claims. A driving ban can be avoided only if the defendant can prove it would cause "exceptional hardship." La Plante's circumstances, the magistrate concluded, did not meet that threshold. The emotional weight of her argument was not enough.

The sentence came down swiftly. A fine of £3,330. A victim surcharge of £1,332. Costs of £130. And a six-month driving ban—the mandatory consequence of 24 points on her licence. For the next half year, La Plante would need to find another way to get Theo to the playing fields. Another way to meet her sources. Another way to live the life she had built around that car.

The case sits at an intersection of sympathy and law. La Plante is not a reckless driver—the speeds were marginal, the context was routine. But the law does not distinguish between the sympathetic and the unsympathetic speeder. It counts points. It applies thresholds. It assumes that if you accumulate enough violations, you have demonstrated a pattern that warrants removal from the road. Whether that assumption holds in any individual case is almost beside the point.