Kiwis caught driving under the influence increasingly keeping it off their records

Sunday, 26 July 2026

After a night of drinking at a function, a high-profile Kiwi sportsman takes an Uber home, then wakes the next morning and gets behind the wheel.

But he’s still over the limit and, when he hits a police checkpoint, he opts for a blood test. It shows his blood alcohol level is 135 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. The criminal limit is 80mgs.

He is charged and appears in court, where his lawyer argues a conviction will affect his ability to travel for work. He is remorseful, donates to charity and volunteers. A conviction would be out of proportion to the nature of the offence.

The argument sticks. He is granted permanent name suppression, receives a discharge without conviction, and pays only the $400-odd cost of the blood test.

This might sound like a rare case. It’s anything but.

Kiwis are increasingly keeping driving under the influence charges off their criminal record. Compared to 2016 figures, the number of people proven to have driven while under the influence but avoiding conviction grew eightfold by 2025.

As a whole, that looked like nearly 10% of people avoiding getting a conviction in 2025. In 2016, just 1% avoided conviction.

The rate of discharged DUI offences was especially high in Wellington courts last year, where more than a quarter (27%) of all people with proven charges avoided conviction. In Porirua it was more than 33.5%. In Hutt Valley it was more than 16%. In Christchurch, Auckland and South Auckland districts it was below 10%.

The trend is starker when taking into account all traffic offending where the numbers of discharges with conviction have grown disproportionately to other offences.

Some 175 individuals across New Zealand were proven to have driven under the influence in 2016 but were discharged without conviction or otherwise avoided conviction due to diversion or going through Youth Court, Ministry of Justice data shows.

That figure grew in subsequent years but almost doubled from 550 in 2022 to 1067 in 2023. The booming rate of discharges was not explained by the number of people being charged, as that was about the same in 2016 as it was in 2025 (about 16,000 to 16,500).

Compare that to drug offences, where in 2016 one offender was discharged without conviction for every 3.5 traffic offenders discharged. Last year, it was one drug offender discharged to every 18 traffic offenders.

David Harvey, a retired district court judge, said the trend “would seem to indicate we are treating this a little less seriously than we once used to”.

Each matter had to be considered case-by-case, but individual cases added up. He referred to scenarios judges might find compelling, like an immigrant whose visa was at stake or a Kiwi who might no longer be able to travel overseas.

That was the case for a green card holder Chia-Jo Chao, 30, who pulled out in front of an approaching vehicle on State Highway 8 near Timaru, injuring the family inside, while on holiday in New Zealand.

Chao, an occupational therapist, pleaded guilty to a careless use of a motor vehicle, but was discharged without conviction because she may not otherwise be allowed to return home to California.

Regardless of the injuries, the judge in her case was satisfied that, given the “current climate of the United States”, the consequences of a conviction for her “momentary lapse in judgment” would be out of proportion to the gravity of the offending.

All Blacks’ head of mental performance Ceri Evans has experienced first-hand the weight of a conviction, even historic, on a career reliant on travel.

Evans is a former All White, Oxford University Rhodes Scholar and internationally recognised forensic psychiatrist, yet he failed to get his 1984 careless driving conviction wiped by the High Court decades later. He was 21 at the time of the offence.

He argued the conviction had caused him embarrassment, shame and inconvenience. Evans guessed he had declared his conviction 100 times when entering Australia. When he went to the United States, he had to attend an interview at its consulate in Auckland to get a visa, where he was asked about his conviction. He said this may happen every time he wanted to enter the US.

The travel argument equally didn’t stick for first time offender Bree Patricia Herbert Thomas, 38, who recorded 600mcg/L in a checkpoint breath test. The criminal limit is 400mcg. Like the sportsman, she’d also been drinking the night before. Her job could have required to travel to Canada “from time to time”. The judge said the effect on her employment was “speculative” and entered a conviction.

Harvey believed the threat of a criminal record was an important deterrent. The drop in deaths on the road since the 1970s could have been, in part, due to how seriously the court began to take drink driving offences, he said.

While it was possible a drink-driver discharged without conviction still faced consequences, like temporarily losing their licence - “old school judges like me who came up in the age of the dinosaur were of the view that if you committed a crime you did the time,” he said.

“If you’re worried about having difficulty getting into Canada or the United States, don’t drink and drive. It’s as simple as that.”

AA’s spokesperson for road safety, Dylan Thomsen, said the Ministry of Justice should explain the data because drink driving was a serious issue and the number of people avoiding conviction was approaching the 10% mark.

It was possible the drivers were still being seriously penalised in lieu of a conviction, but there was no way to know for sure, he said.

“Driving, for most people, is the riskiest thing that they do most days, so we need to have people treating it very seriously,” he said.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said there was no research being done on the subject and they could not comment because the judiciary worked independently.

The ministry data did not distinguish between New Zealand citizens and others.