A couple weeks ago James went down to the court house and requested a copy of all the paper work that has been filed in his case that is pending, for the sum of $1.00 he received one piece of paper, which was a photo copy of the speeding ticket that the officer wrote James. This presents a big problem for the prosecution because there is no reference to any code or statute listed on the ticket, and there is no other paper work filed in the case that is charging him with an “offense”.
This is how corrupt these folks have gotten in these courts, they don’t even bother to file the appropriate paper work. They just assume that no one will ever look and force their hand to play by the rules. Well, James did look, and he is forcing their hand to play ball by the rules.
James filed a motion on March 1st with the clerk of the court for a “show cause hearing” on why he is required to appear for court on the 20th when he has not been officially charged with any crime. As per the law, James was required to deliver a copy of the motion to the district attorney’s office, which he did in person and got a receipt signed by the lady at the front desk of the DA’s office. On the afternoon of March 2nd James received a phone call from the assistant DA asking him just what he is trying to do.
James got a call last Friday from the asst. DA again, the asst. DA informed James that the charges are being dismissed and by this Thursday, his speeding charges will be dismissed and he can check on line and see that his case will be removed from the docket for the 20th, and showing that the outcome of the case will be “dismissed”.
Well, if the DA does in fact dismiss the charges, which are non-existent, it will be a victory. Honestly it was a disappointment for me to hear this, but it does show that if you hold them accountable they will back down. They know that they are screwing people left and right and are willing to give up few “marks” to keep their fraud intact.
I really wanted to see the reaction of the judge and the asst. DA when James would have entered his plea of “not guilty by reason of insanity” at his hearing. Filing the motion for the show cause hearing took that away, the end result though is a positive one for James, his other attempts at trying to “beat” his speeding tickets have never worked in the past and this attempt did. Yea, James!!!
Just to give you an idea on just how big a racket this traffic court is let me give you some numbers for the cases that are to appear today, March, 14th in this court. For the 8:00AM docket there are 201 appearances hearings, I added up the total fines for just the first 50 cases on the docket, the average fine works out to be $181.10 per ticket. If you multiply that out by the 201 cases it totals $36,401.10 , that is pretty good lump of money for a couple hours worth of work, because most people will opt to pay the fine online and never even make an appearance in court. The 1:00PM docket has 261 cases on it, so if we use the same $181.10 that afternoon session total comes out to $47,267.10 ; the total day’s revenue potential is $83,668.20.
I took the opportunity to check and see what next week’s docket schedule has listed; there are 2,547 appearance cases listed, if you multiply that by the $181.10 it comes out to $461,261.70. I won’t go as far as to say that this is an every week average but let’s say that it was only 26 weeks out the year, the total in fines would be close to $12 million a year in this one court alone, rest assured that this has nothing to do about making the roads “safer” and everything to do about being a substantial revenue stream for the county precinct.
You can easily see when you look at the numbers that letting a few people like James off the hook is not even a drop in the bucket. The potential exposure that a jury trial case could bring with the likes of James could end up exposing just how corrupt this system is though.
I think that I may end up doing a little comparative analysis of the different JP courts in the county and see just how they all compare when I get the chance. I took a look at one other precinct court docket for next week and it had less than 500 cases for the whole week. I can’t believe that where we live in the county that we are 5 times as bad of drivers as in another precinct, or are we just being targeted?
Well that’s all for this edition, until next time,
