Sure hope the cop doesn’t have a friend…
Told you so…just sayin’.
And how do you know these were the grounds upon which the judge based his decision? Specifically the last – did he literally say that?
Yeah, that was my question too. My hunch is that this account of the proceedings tells us at least as much about the OP’s reliability as a witness than it does about the court procedure.
Another reason why people fight tickets - they think the police officer is wrong.
About two years ago I got pulled over for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. I simply told the officer “I believe I did come to a full stop.” No further arguing, and he wrote the ticket. (“Well, the officer up at the corner who witnessed it says you didn’t”) Instead of paying, I asked for a trial on principle.
My main annoyance at the process was that it had been on the news that the police were told they had a quota not long before - of course, then officially denied that was what the memo meant. Plus, this was a sneaky setup - 90% of the traffic came to that corner 4-way stop and turned left during rush hour - almost no other traffic. A block down the road, the police came out and waved you into a side street to get your ticket. The police had 5 cars lined up for tickets, and 5 more came in while they were writing mine. One car (one car!) went by without being pulled in, possibly because he had to stop and wait for cross-traffic. So in the space of 3 or 4 minutes, 12 cars go by and one does not get a ticket. Either the guy observing has an incredibly strict (or mistaken) idea what constitutes a stop, or none of the other police in the area are doing their job, since “failure to stop” is not an epidemic of tickets all year round.
So I sent in the ticket to ask for a trial. 3 months later, I get the court date - 14 months after the ticket. I get to court, and first thing the court clerk does is call out about 20 names - perhaps half the docket - and tell them “charges have been dismissed”.
So was it a scam - throw 100 tickets out, and if the person contests drop it, for the other 90%, collect free cash? Were the courts overloaded? A co-worker said they generally dismiss the case anyway if the person had a clean driving record (for me 2 tickets in over 20 years, the last 12 years ago); maybe they saw the difficulty in claiming that over 90% of drivers did not stop properly; maybe it would be too expensive to send the police officer to court over and over again for questionable tickets. maybe a guy writing a ticket who didn’t see the offense is not allowed. Leaving court, I talked to one woman who also had charges dismissed, who got the same ticket, same place, different day.
So I never got to see whether the judge believed the officer over me.
The Court Commissioner (not usually a judge in California) hears hundreds of traffic cases. He or she will be replaced by the judges if the police departments complain they are not winning their cases. However, the commissioners are familiar with certain police officers who have no credibility. They lose their cases and there are no consequences to the commissioner. Also, if you can prove with other evidence that you are telling the truth and the LEO is mistaken, you may win. I’ve advised people accused of driving while cell phoning to produce their phone bill to show no call was being made. They have won. One of these was a problem officer, and this may have helped too.
Yes he did.
It may be a total crapshoot, depending on the judge (or commissioner) you get.
A long time ago, in a county far away, I got summoned for jury duty (which ended up not happening). I went to the court about a week ahead and sat through a session just to see what goes on in a court. They were hearing traffic cases that day. The commissioner wasn’t interested in hearing anything any defendant had to say. The police had a few magic phrases they uttered (like “I saw the front of defendant’s car dip”) and that’s all the judge needed to hear.
One guy tried to question a speeding ticket that was based on a hand-held police radar. Just as I’ve often seen suggested, he subpoenaed all sort of documents about the maintenance and calibration history of the radar unit in question. The police ignored all that and didn’t bring or submit any such documents to the court. The defendant’s lawyer (who seemed like a real wimp) challenged everything. The judge said outright that he didn’t care about any of that.
Verdicts weren’t announced in court, so I don’t know how the case came out. I think he was convicted, because I thought all his attempted defenses were grasping at straws. But I also thought the judge didn’t give a damn about his attempted defenses.
IAAL. The entire american criminal “justice” system is predicated on judges and juries accepting LEOs word over defendants. Because defendants are presumed guilty, and LEOs are presumed brave heroes who would never tell a lie and who (laughably) have no motivation to tell a lie. Then they get paid their 8 hours of quadruple overtime pay for the 45 minutes they spent at court testi-lying. Had the defendant been guilty, statistically the chances are he/she would have pleaded out, which would mean no need for the officer to show up in court which would mean no windfall for the officer in overtime pay. So there’s a huge motivation for LEOs to arrest innocent people. This is particularly true with DWI, the most subjective crime in the entire penal code, which requires ZERO EVIDENCE beyond the officer’s claim that the defendant had “slurred speech, glassy eyes, and smell of alcohol” - all circumstantial claims that can never be proven in court with actual evidence (breathalizer is irrelevant).
Most crimes require little evidence to convict, but there are two crimes where no evidence at all is required for a conviction - rape and DWI.
Add rolling through a stop sign to that list
As a lawyer, perhaps you could give us a brief discussion on the role of the finder of fact?
And when you appealed, and assigned as error the abuse of discretion as shown by the judge’s actual words, what did the appellate judge or court do?
I ask because a trial judge that predicates a guilty verdict upon the assumption that the police would not have issued the ticket if not for guilt has abused his discretion as a matter of law. The judge is certainly free to weigh the credibility of witnesses and believe one over the other, but not to base a conviction on the presumed truth of the charging document. In effect, any judge who publicly says what you claim the judge says has handed the accused a strong appeal issue.
Does traffic court in your jurisdiction make transcripts of the proceedings or do the judges hand down written opinions? If the judge handed down a written ruling, I bet those words weren’t in there. It’s hard to appeal without either of those.
And besides at a minimum of $400 an hour for an attorney, who is going to appeal a traffic citation?
No. In my state, there’s an appeal as of right, and appealing the decision of the general district court vacates the ruling, and you get an automatic new trial at the circuit court.
Certainly if I were wronged by perjury of the officer at trial, I’d appeal. I would also complain to whatever commission oversees judicial conduct. For that step, I don’t need a transcript; I have a courtroom full of witnesses.
You left out “corroborating” for that “evidence”.
There has to be at least a witness… I think you mean “its enough that there is one witness”.
and surely there are more crimes…eg all the sexual crimes, such as indecent assault and so on that only need one witness.
But anyway numerous cases the evidence can’t really be said to be “smoking gun” or anything like it … Eg in shop lifting from a shop, the shop keeper says it was him, but they don’t have the item stolen. There’s circumstantial, such as he has form, he had some cash, his alibi is pathetic…
The written decision said the LEO observed my headlights as I went through the stop. Nothing in the decision said the LEO never testified to that but instead the judge assumed it so I ended up not appealing.
How would the existance of all those witnesses help unless you knew all their names and had them make some kind of statement as to what the judge said? It seems to me that a typical civilian would end up right back where they started in the first place: it’s their word against the word of a judge. So who’s the commission going to believe?
There was a thread a few years back about not ever talking to cops who were investigating something – anything. There was a link to a lecture by a detective, who descibed something about how he gained confessions.
The real point of this is that he tape recorded his interviews, made notes from the tapes, and then recycled the tapes. He didn’t use them as evidence – he was so confident the judges would take his word for what the defendant said or admitted that he didn’t even bother to keep the recordings.
Well, I wouldn’t be so hasty there. A fact-finder is allowed to believe or disbelieve any of the testimony he hears, and also allowed to make reasonable inferences from the testimony he believes. So it’s not necessarily a problem for the judge to find, as fact, that the LEO observed your headlights as you went through the stop, even though the LEO never said specifically that he did – as long as his other testimony allowed a reasonable inference that he saw the lights.
Sorry – I’m a bit late to this party, but if you Google “Mack’s Creek Law,” you will find this kind of small-town funding is currently a hot topic in Missouri, and the Attorney General is trying to limit such actions.