Let’s say that this coming Sunday, March 8, at 2:15 A.M. local time, I’m pulled over for my Jeep having bad karma, a violation of Missouri’s traffic code. The police report says:
“At 2:15 A.M. on 8 March 2015, I observed bad karma emanating from Suspect’s vehicle. Field tests proved the vehicle did indeed have bad karma. Suspect was issued a citation.”
I go before the judge and claim that 2:15 A.M. on 8 March 2015 did not legally exist, as Missouri observes Daylight Saving Time and thus, at 2:00 A.M. on that day, the time automatically became 3:00 A.M., and thus the police report is full of lies! LIES!
Has anyone ever tried such a defense? Did it work?
There is a reason most charging documents say the crime happened “on or about” a certain date and time. In any event, the exact time is not likely to be an element of the offense and does not have to be proven anyway. It might get interesting if it’s a 2:00 am bar closing time violation.
When, exactly, do you suppose that this time to have occurred?
If it’s 15 minutes after 2:00 AM, then according to what you’ve described, it’s 3:15 AM. Unless you meant that the area where the infraction occurred does not observe DST, but I don’t see that as a defense either.
If you’re arguing over an error on the police report (officer indicating 2:15 AM by mistake), that has little to do with DST, but that doesn’t seem to be what you were saying anyway.
The judges at the ones I’ve been to had little patience for bullshit and your defense would most likely just annoy the judge and get you the maximum penalty.
My senior prom was held on the Saturday of the very first ever instance of daylight saving time in the state where I lived. I was supposed to be home from the prom at 2 a.m. But there was no two a.m.! So I stayed out all night. (There were after-parties; the prom itself ended at midnight.)
My reasoning was: The only way to make curfew would be to get home at 1:59am. But that would be one minute early. The next minute it was legally 3 am and I was already an hour late, so might as well be even later–right?
It did not work. I ended up grounded until further notice. Based on this I decided to start college in the summer session rather than starting in the fall and being grounded all summer, so I was out of there in three weeks and never went back.
Depends on the court. I have seen traffic courts where that error would be enough to throw it out. OTOH, my last ticket, the judge basically testified for the Deputy (I’m sure he saw … even though on cross he never testified to that fact despite being given the opportunity) just so he could rationalize his legal theory of “He wouldn’t have given you a ticket unless you were guilty.” despite me making the deputy look like a complete idiot such as not knowing if there was a limit line at the intersection and not being able to see my car clearly or my tires for the infraction. That judge wouldn’t care what was wrong with your ticket.
It doesn’t work the other way either. If you go to a bar on the night DST ends, in a state where bars are required to close at 2 AM, and try to convince the bartender that he can continue to serve you after 1:59:59 because it goes back to 1:00:00, he will not listen. And he’ll cut you off even earlier if you persist.
I’ve even seen cases successfully prosecuted with the wrong date written on the ticket (cop wrote Friday, May 10th when the 10th was Thursday)*. And Judges do get annoyed at this – they know more than anyone how busy the court system is, and they don’t take kindly to silly cases like this making their court calendar more busy.
And any Judge who consistently let defendants off because of a minor clerical mistake by the cop writing the ticket would soon get a talking-to by the Chief Judge. Who might ask him how much of court personnel salaries are paid with fine money, and similar pertinent questions. Or the Chief Judge might tell the Court Clerk to examine very closely every single document from that Judge, and anyone that has the minutest typo or spelling or other minor error be sent back to him to do over – he’d get the message pretty quickly.
*that case actually went like this:
Judge: “Well, then, which day were you speeding, Thursday or Friday?”
Defendant: “It was Thursday!”
Judge: “So you have admitted to speeding on Thursday, the officer says that you were speeding on Friday. I think that if you were speeding on Thursday, you were probably also speeding on Friday like the ticket says. So I find you guilty of 2 counts of speeding. See the Clerk to make arrangement to pay both sets of fines. Call the next case.”
In Germany, there is a law (actually a regulation) addressing this specific issue: When clocks are turned back one hour in October, the 2 o’clock hour has to be amended with a capital letter “A” or “B” respectively, thus either 2:15A or 2:15B
There’s a legal term for this - ‘mere particular’ - though for some reason it doesn’t show in the usual Google searches.
In effect it means that it’s not actually relevant to the charge even if its wrong.
However I’ve used the wrong time excuse for a parking ticket and won - or at least avoided court. The parking inspector got confused between normal time and 24 hr time and wrote the alleged offence occurred at 16:05 rather than 6:05 pm. When challenged the council changed it to 17:05 (?!) which I was able to show was impossible because the vehicle was provably elsewhere at the time. They gave up at that stage.
In situations where the time can become a legal issue, for example hospital records, the usual practice is to mark the actual time with either DT or ST (for Daylight saving Time or Standard Time). In the example in the OP, the proper way of designating the time would have been “At 2:15 A.M. ST on 8 March 2015”. Of course, as already been mentioned upthread, the time is not likely an element of the offense, so this would not be an issue.
As far as bar closings go, no bar I have been in has said at 1:59 AM DT that they would close even though they were changing to ST.
Another way this is often handled, for example on security camera footage, is to record the time as Greenwich Mean Time (or, UTC if you are French), which does not change with the seasons.
I think laypersons in general tend to (erronously) view the law as inflexibly technical. The fact is that the law is flexible enough to tolerate even mistakes by judges.
The OP’s idea is not entirely unreasonable, as it’s essentially challenging the credibility of the officer writing the ticket. But it’s not the “aha!” mistake that would automatically lead to a dismissal of the ticket.
I fought a ticket for parking on a street where parking wasn’t allowed without a permit before 8 am. The “time” part of the ticket was blank! The judge at first thought that I had wiped my carbon copy to create the blank line, but a clerk was sent to retrieve the original.
The judge asked me what time I was claiming my car was there. I said I was making no claim, but neither was the cop. Not guilty!
But that’s a case where the time is an element of the offence, rather than just part of the factual context, so it makes sense that a failure to include the time is a defence. For most offences, the time is not part of the offence, so an error in time on the charging document isn’t a defence.
I think that was the judge in my case too. Let’s see: acting as the prosecution, assuming facts not in evidence, assuming defendant is guilty (in my case it was “Everyone rolls through stop signs on occasion no matter how safe they drive”).
Yep that was my judge.