Earlier in the week we discussed the evidence you need to collect to fight your ticket in court. While you’re collecting your evidence, you need to tell the court about your intentions of pleading not guilty and a court date. We are going to discuss what your court strategy should be. 
If you are going to plead not
guilty, you are going to have to notify the court of your intentions and be
prepared to show up. If the jurisdiction where the ticket was issued runs its
court on administrative law, the judge most likely is not affiliated with a court
per se, but rather with a government agency, like a state’s department of motor
vehicles. In these courts, bail is
usually not required, but there is no plea-bargaining. The good news is that
you usually won’t have to put up extra money (bail) to prove your innocence,
but the bad news is that you will not be able to bargain with the prosecutor or
the court for a less insurance-damaging charge. Administrative law judges
usually don’t have the power to jail you, but in their hearings, which are more
about revenue collection than punishment, they have less discretion and are
usually under stricter guidelines as to what they can find you guilty for, and
what penalty they can fine you.
If you are remanded to a local
court, you will appear before a judge or justice of the peace. This kind of
judge does have the power to jail you and order you to post bail. Most
jurisdictions have the discretion to plea bargain your ticket. Sometimes an
associate district attorney or town, village, or county prosecutor or attorney
will greet you before the proceeding to discuss your options before he or she
tries your case. Sometimes you’re a one-man show between you, the officer
writing the ticket, and the judge.
No matter what you do, try never
to get a ticket on any kind of Federal property belonging to the United States
Government. If you do, your ticket will be remanded to the Federal District
Court in which the ticket’s jurisdiction belongs. The judge presiding over your ticket will be a United States
Federal Court Judge, a jurist who is appointed for life by whomever the sitting
President of the United States was at the time of their appointment. If this
judge was appointed by a recent President, he or she was probably subjected to
a very scrutinous, contentious, and political confirmation process to sit on
that bench. The judge’s confirmation requires a majority vote by the United
States Senate. In recent politics it takes more than 50 senators to do this, and this is
asking for much. I mention all of this because whomever that Federal Court
Judge is that you are appearing in front of with your measly miserable speeding
or traffic ticket, there is a good chance that the Federal Judge will not be
happy to be presiding over your ticket, and there’s a good chance he or she
will tell you so. In many legal cases, a Federal Judge’s job begins when a
panel of any state’s Supreme Court ends with an appeal. SO here you are: while
Judge Sam Scalito of the Ninth Federal Circuit is deciding how much BP should
pay for their oil spill in the Gulf, what kind of penalties the Defense and
Justice Department should be subjected to for not repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t
Tell,” and what kind of life or death sentence mob boss Vinnie “the Chin”
Girgante should get after his conviction, he has decide if you were speeding on
a Coast Guard base or in a federal park, and how much should you pay. Not good.
Therefore, Judge Scalito might even tell you that he or she did not go through
the aggravation of sitting on a federal bench to be a traffic court judge. Not a
good place for a passing motorist to be. So be careful on federal property and
always tread lightly.
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| Make sure that if by chance your ticket winds up in the federal courts, it is because it got there by appeal, and never by remand. It's just not a cool thing for a federal judge to be presiding over a ticket that was issued and returned directly to a federal court. |
No matter what court you’re
remanded to, the rule is to DELAY DELAY DELAY. In most states, the points on
your license begin at the moment of conviction for eighteen months after the
date of issue. The longer you can hold off, the less time you will have the
points off your license. If your hearing is past the eighteen months, there
won’t be points to worry about. And if you can postpone on dates like the officer’s
vacation, or on a holiday that is not federalized, where it’s 50/50 either the
banks, courts, or post office might be open, there’s a chance you might even
have it dismissed. But that’s more about connections and luck if anything else
. . .
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Thanks for such a nice post! It is very useful post.
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