I forget where I heard this*, but I was once told that there is no such thing as “traffic court” (at least in some US States). In States where this is true, I am told that traffic laws fall under criminal law, and technically a traffic violation is addressed in criminal court. Can the SD confirm that this is true?
As A1 has been saying lately, “Yeah, it’s that important!” for me to know for sure,
Jinx
*I bet it goes back to my first experience in “traffic court” when a man in handcuffs was brought before a judge for hunting at a State Park. It was a quick hearing to set a date for a later trial. I was amazed he’d be in the same courtroom.
In my experience, they usually have court dedicated to traffic-only in larger cities where there is enough volume.
Generally though, there is a municipal (city or county) level court for ordinance violations and traffic citations. These are treated at one level below misdemeanors and are separated from the courts where crimes like robbery etc are heard.
However, traffic violations are technically criminal cases as there are state statutes that you are violating and if you’re case is serious or you have lots of cases, you end up facing misdemeanor charges.
In other words, they are criminal, but minor tickets and stuff are just processed seperately for efficiency.
There are several hundred answers to this question, a point Flipshod alludes to. In general, traffic cases are “criminal procedure” rather than “civil procedure” – that is, they’re in the form “State vs. Offender” rather than “Plaintiff vs. Respondent”, where the law enforcement arm of the state charges that you committed some offense.
Most states have a bottom-level court for disposing of minor offenses such as traffic tickets, disorderly conduct, trespassing, and the like, which will bind over major offenses to be heard at a higher level. There are 50-odd specific structures for this: Federal magistrates (with traffic and similar authority only on military reservations, etc.), each separate state’s procedures, and different ones for the commonwealths and territories. Some states have justices of the peace for each small town and township who individually constitute this bottom-level court. In other states, it’s heard along with misdemeanor crimes at a district-court level, generally more or less on a county-wide basis. High population areas (cities, large suburban counties, etc.) with busy court dockets may well have set up separate “traffic courts” specifically for the disposition of traffic offenses. In other cases, everything is consolidated in one bottom-level court.
My wife’s recent appearance here for a traffic offense was in District Court, and they conducted misdemeanor-level offenses and one actual trial (on a domestic-violence case) along with dealing with an assortment of speeding, expired-inspection, and other such cases. In New York, we were friends with a Justice of the Peace (a retired man running a motel and available for arraignments and such) whose normal docket was 90% traffic cases, but who would regularly if infrequently hold arraignments and initial hearings for people charged with burglarly, murder, etc., to bind them over for indictment and trial at the County Court level. In one large city we knew, City Court was divided into civil, criminal, and traffic “parts” for the disposition of cases falling in each of those levels.
Reminds me of something:
The first time I ever went to court for a traffic citation, the judge was hearing all kinds of cases. There was a girl who’s shoplifting case came up while I was waiting, she plead guilty.
About 3 days later, the same girl (she was really cute, so I remembered her) is wandering around the department store where I worked. I clued security, and sure enough, they caught her at it again.