In D.C., No More Due Process for Parking Tickets
Radley Balko | November 12, 2007, 10:02am
TheNewspaper.com reports:
In an attempt to stem the loss of revenue from motorists contesting parking tickets, cities are effectively eliminating the traditional due process rights of motorists to defend themselves at an impartial hearing. By the end of next year, Washington, DC's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will not allow anyone who believes he unfairly received a citation to have his day in an administrative hearing.
"DMV will complete the phase-out of in-person adjudication of parking tickets in favor of mail-in and e-mail adjudication by December 2008," the Fiscal Year 2008 DMV plan states.
The move is intended to allow automated street sweeper parking ticket machines to boost the number of infractions cited well beyond the 1.6 million currently handed out by meter maids. As one-third of those who contest citations in the city are successful, the hearings cut significantly into the $100 million in revenue tickets generate each year.
Under the DMV's plan, motorists will only be able to object to a ticket by email or letter where city employees can ignore or reject letters in bulk without affected motorists having any realistic recourse.
And this is cute:
In Boston and other cities in Massachusetts, motorists cannot challenge a $100 parking ticket in court without first paying a $275 court fee. If found innocent, the motorist does not receive a refund of the $275.
Fluffy | November 12, 2007, 5:06pm | #
"Fair enough, but parking enforcement is not a criminal matter."
This is absolutely false.
If the state can compel me to behave a certain way or pay a fine, it's a criminal matter.
"No, I'm saying you get five minutes in front of a judge. That's the way it works now, right?"
Right, but:
1} This article is about municipalities that don't want you to get that five minutes, and you're defending them; and
2) If 5 minutes in front of a judge is so fair, why don't we do everything else that way?
"the annoyances caused by the large number of people who choose to ignore them are not trivial."
If it's not trivial, the state can rustle up a jury, or it can defy the Constitution.
Look, you may think I'm just fucking with you, but I'm not. In a host of ways the modern state wants to micromanage its citizens' lives in ways that require it to dispense with several Constitutional protections. Your "Aw, come on, we can't run these traffic courts if we have to do jury trials" attitude is duplicated elsewhere, whether we're talking about asset seizure, drug courts, tax courts, the FISA court, etc. I say fuck 'em. Do it the right way or don't do it. You want your parking problem to simultaneously be too trivial to warrant the basic protections of the Constitution [or hell - the Magna Carta] but at the same time be this terribly important matter to the citizenry that the state must act on. It can't be both.
John Pesack | November 15, 2007, 1:53pm | #
DC is not the only victim of blind enforcement of parking regulations. Let me provide a recent anecdote from my own parking ticket odyssey:
Last month I drove from my home in Winter Haven, Florida, to Jacksonville for a trial that was to take place the next day. This is a distance of about 4 hours, so I decided to stay overnight at a house belonging to a friend who lives in Palm Coast, just north of Daytona Beach. I have stayed at my friend's house before, sometimes parking on the side of the street, and other times parking in his driveway. His house is 2nd from the end of a cul-de-sac in a small subdivision, and there are no houses on the other side of the street.
He asked me to park on the street because he and his wife were going to leave early for work the next day and he didn't want to have to wake me up to move my truck, so I did. I parked my truck mostly in his front yard, leaving about one foot on the road, so that I would not block any other traffic.
The next morning I awoke to find a parking ticket in my windshield for parking in the swale. I thought it must be some kind of joke, so I drove to the Palm Coast Sheriff's sub-station to ask why I had received the ticket. I was told that it was illegal to park in the swale between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. by Palm Coast city ordinance. The deputy there said that the law had been on the books for about nine years now; it's even posted on their website. Of course, I am a frequent visitor to the City of Palm Coast website, so I feel sort of stupid for missing that one.
I did my best to nicely argue my way out of the useless (but costly at $25) ticket, but I was told my only recourse was to make an appearance at city hall to contest it. In the end, it was easier for me to just pay the $25.00 than try to track down their evasive city hall building or take a day off from work and drive 2 1/2 hours to Palm Coast for a case that I would probably lose anyway.
Evidently the City of Palm Coast is making so much ticket money that it can coerce county deputies into driving around in subdivisions all night to write out tickets for completely innocuous violations. It's amazing to me that deputies are out at 1:00 a.m. rigidly enforcing parking tickets, yet in ten years I've n
