I have a few unpaid parking tickets for a vehicle which I no longer own (totaled and disposed in NYC). Do I still have to pay the tickets? What negative consequences do I face if I choose not to pay at all?
The unpaid tickets still need to be paid. After a period of time, not sure how long, a bench warrant will be issued for your arrest, and if you are stopped or have your name searched for any other reason, you will be arrested for failure to pay the outstanding tickets. Your license may also be suspended, and/or your car registration put on hold.
Yeah, pay those tickets. They will arrest you. As a child I got a ride home from a policeman while they took my dad to jail in a case like this.
You say you no longer own the offending vehicle. The primary determinant in deciding if you must pay the tickets is whether or not you were the owner of record of the vehicle on the date(s) of the offense(s), I think.
IANAL, but my logical mind just fired off the following email to an attorney firm that specializes in collections for municipalities:
Besides, the tickets were for parking illegally, not for owning an illegally parked car.
The version of this scenario where I was no longer the owner of the car when the offenses occurred happened to me when I was in college. I think the offense was more severe than parking, though. I went to student legal services and at their recommendation made a notarized statement that I was no longer the owner of the car. I kept that on file, but never heard anything more about it from the city.
Another possible outcome is that the city will sell your outstanding ticket to a collection agency. This happened to my SO years ago. He never actually saw the parking ticket, and neither the city nor the collection agency sent any notification.
The first we knew about it was when we tried to get a mortgage, and it showed up on his credit history as an outstanding collection. Because we had not time, we just paid the darn thing, so we could get our condo. By the time you added on the city’s fees and the collection companies fees, it was rather more then the original parking ticket cost.
Define “disposed.” Taken by your insurance company after they declared it a total loss? Turned over to a salvage yard? If it was something like that, you should have paperwork to show that ownership was transferred, and by presenting proof that you didn’t own it you can have the tickets against you negated. And you’re probably off the hook if it was stolen and reported as such before the tickets were issued. But if “disposed” means abandoned somewhere, or given to someone who did not take verifiable legal possession of it, you’re fully responsible for them.
Trying to get out of parking tickets because you don’t own the car in question anymore is somewhat like trying to get out of an assault and battery warrant because the person you beat up died later of a heart attack.
My response was on the assumption that the tickets were issued after the car was “disposed.” Sometimes tickets do get erroneously issued to a vehicle’s previous owner, and will be dismissed if that person can prove non-ownership at the time they were issued.
If the tickets were issued while you still clearly owned the car, you are definitely responsible for them, and BobT’s analogy above applies. Perhaps a better analogy would be, if you shoot someone, disposing of the gun doesn’t alleviate your responsibility for what you did with it while you possessed it.
Well, that sounds reasonable to me. I mean it’s not like they’re going to be complaining about it anymore.