The court heard that Lucy Jane Langlois, of Courtil St Jacques, St Peter Port, drove the wrong way down a temporary no entry at Les Gravees, St Peter Port, in November last year.
A traffic warden was in his car driving in the opposite direction.
He immediately challenged Langlois and got her to pull over.
Crown Advocate Fiona Russell played the court body-worn camera footage recorded by the traffic warden in which Langlois could be seen and heard remonstrating with him when he told her that he was going to issue a fixed penalty ticket.
Langlois said she had driven that way in order to get to her home and became increasingly agitated and attempted to drive off.
Her two youngest children were in the car and were audibly upset at what was happening.
When the traffic warden stood in front of her car she slowly drove towards him, causing him to briefly go onto the car’s bonnet.
He radioed for police assistance. Officers soon arrived and Langlois was arrested.
Advocate Paul Lockwood, defending, presented a letter to the court from Langlois’ doctor and said that she had a complex medical history.
The first time he met her she was bewildered and distressed, Advocate Lockwood said.
‘She’s a respectable mother of three who couldn’t understand why she had done such a thing,’ he said.
During the encounter with the traffic warden ‘she snapped and broke down’ and as it went on she became more and more ill.
‘It was a perfect storm of pressure and distress.’
She had no previous convictions and had never even had a parking ticket, said the advocate, and was assessed as having a very low risk of re-offending.
She was hugely ashamed of her behaviour and horrified to have seen it again on the footage.
Judge Gary Perry said Langlois had verbally assaulted a public servant doing their job, and doing it correctly.
From the moment she was stopped by the traffic warden she ‘was on his case’, he said.
This was a ‘shockingly serious offence’ and Judge Perry said the only reason he was not giving her an immediate prison sentence was because he did not wish her two young children to be punished for her actions.
‘You should be ashamed that it’s taken your two young children being distressed in this way to save you from prison,’ he said.
Langlois was sentenced to four months in prison, suspended for two years, and a one-year suspended sentence supervision order.
She was also banned from driving for four years.
