Over in the Bay Area the other day and I was pulled over for an illegal turn. After comming to a complere stop at a red light, I made the turn. 3 signs said no turn on red. Fair enough I was guilt. I recieved a written warning . Great. Later I got to thinking, in California. , and probably most places, when you sign the ticket , you promise to appear in court at the time and place indicated. Currently under the state and county emergency orders, all the courts (traffic anyway) are closed untill firther notice.
If the courts are closed indefinitely, the person recieving the ticket could sign it, but he is not making any promise to appear at any place at a specific time. He can't be held in contempt for not showing up. What if you had a court date and when you showed up the sign on the door said Closed for Business. What if you were charged with a crime , such as a Drunk Driving? What if your trial was in progress when the court shut down and the jury sent home ? Right to a speedy trial, due process, equal protection , double jeopardy?

Maybe the best person to ask is the officer giving you the ticket the next time.

To answer one, I would advise the ticketed person that they had 10 working days to contact the court in reference to the ticket or they could receive an additional charge of fail to appear.

I couldn’t tell you what is going on now especially since there are WAY too many jurisdictions out there with their own procedures in these extraordinary times. Just one possibility is to leave a voice mail within time period at the court and/or to follow directions of the court’s recorded message.

For new tickets, we're currently issuing court dates in July. The hope is that this will have blown over by then. But there's going to be a big backlog in the courts.

As for your other questions about the courts being closed, the AR Supreme Court issued an order to the lower Arkansas courts last week that only "essential" court hearings could be held for the near future, and those can only be done by phone or teleconference. They provided a list of 8 or so different types of "essential" hearings. So unless the hearing falls into one of the 8 or so exceptions (mainly dealing with probable cause hearings for new arrests, and emergencies like temporary orders of protection that can't wait), it is postponed to a later date.

Speedy Trial requirements (and most of the various other court hearing time limits) have some exceptions allowed by law, like when the defendant waives it, when awaiting certain court ordered assessments, or when "good cause" is shown to delay the hearing. A lockdown in response to a worldwide epidemic is "good cause" to delay a speedy trial.

In my state all traffic cases except DUI and reckless driving are continued until October. Notice will be sent.

Your post said you received a written warning. Why would you need to go to court? It’s a warning.

The cops know their court days out for six months...they can assign one for one six months down the road. But like now in NC the courts are shut down, the clerk of courts will send a new court date thru the mail. Or more than likely will allow them to be paid off vis mail or online.

quote:

Originally posted by 357fuzz:

Your post said you received a written warning. Why would you need to go to court? It’s a warning.

I think that OP was asking a hypothetical question.

quote:

Later I got to thinking

quote:

Originally posted by MikeinNC:
The cops know their court days out for six months...they can assign one for one six months down the road. But like now in NC the courts are shut down, the clerk of courts will send a new court date thru the mail. Or more than likely will allow them to be paid off vis mail or online.

We never knew court dates in advance, but were notified of the date by the court. They used to send lists of officers for court which we’d post at the station. As time went on, we finally went to an electronic system where if we didn’t reply to the notice, our supervisor was notified.

My old partner also retired, but he got on as a deputy constable. I can text him to see what their Justice of the Peace court is doing if you care for their anecdotal information. We talked about two weeks ago, but he didn’t mention any different procedures at that time.

quote:

If the courts are closed indefinitely, the person recieving the ticket could sign it, but he is not making any promise to appear at any place at a specific time. He can't be held in contempt for not showing up. What if you had a court date and when you showed up the sign on the door said Closed for Business. What if you were charged with a crime , such as a Drunk Driving? What if your trial was in progress when the court shut down and the jury sent home ? Right to a speedy trial, due process, equal protection , double jeopardy?

I can rely for Washington.

For tickets, these are CIVIL not CRIMINAL. You will be sent notice in the mail whenever the courts start doing that again (when each court (here it's district for the county and municipal for city limits) is going to start doing that may be different, that hard to say at this point since a) this is without precedent and b) the only precedent we have is when they started to shut down and that was . . .less than uniform).

There is no double jeopardy in civil cases (although there are legal principals like that that would protect), jury trial or speedy trial rights like for a criminal case. While there may be the right to jury trial for some civil cases, there certainly is no speedy trial right that would be impacted by the situation we are in.

Criminal Stuff to follow:

For criminal trials in progress, they were allowed to finish. In order to give social distance all other jury trials were cancelled.

All non-essential hearings, basically everything except new priority in-custody cases (DV, violent offenses), and emergency orders like DV protection orders and emergency family law orders are cancelled and new notices will be sent re: above.

Double jeopardy only applies: 1) if you have been placed in jeopardy, and 2) if you are being re-tried. This is why all trials where jury selection has finished are still proceeding, thats when jeopardy attaches. Otherwise, with some exceptions, the trial is not started for double jeopardy purposes.

Speedy trial - there are two aspects of speedy trial: court rules and the Constitution. Under the Constitution, whatever you think of speedy trial certainly isn't it. There have been criminal cases where, for one reason or the other, cases were continued for YEARS over the objection of the defendant. I haven't followed the US Constitutional right to speedy trial because, as shown below, the Washington Constutition is more protective, but as of 1996 when I graduated, there was not a single PUBLISHED case ever dismissed for a violation of the US right to speedy trial. BUT there are COURT RULES protecting defendants. They are protective and if violated then the case is dismissed, but at least in Washington those rules are suspended for the duration until further notice. Yes even for in-custody people waiting for trial. In Washington, under the Washington Constitution, the right to speedy trial is at most nine months [i.e. there was a published case were a defendant over his continued objection was held in custody and tried nine months later, the speedy trial rule required trial within 60 days and the prosecutor asked for and got several continuances by the trial court resulting in the nine month day. The Court of Appeals (the level above Superior Court (here the trial court) and below the Washington State Supreme Court said that was too long]. Whether a lesser time would also violate the WA speedy trial rules, I would be willing to bet we will see about two years from now when all those cases hit the WA Supreme Court.

Equal protection and due process don't apply here. Everyone is being treated equally (and if someone wasn't, it will be super fact specific and wonky so not really a good subject to generalize on0, and eventually you are going to get due process [notice and the opportunity to be heard] just not in a speedy way which then see above.

Make sense??

Our courts have shut down. If your address is current you will receive a notice of a new appearance date to handle your ticket.

I didn't want my post to get buried in the continual saga of the "primary" thread on the China Wuhan Flu, so I'll ask it here. My county has just been placed on a "Stay-home-work-safe" ORDER...it's right there in the title.



HOUSTON – People who live in Harris County and the city of Houston have been ordered to stay home as leaders aim to stop the spread of coronavirus in the nation’s third-largest county.

The stay-home-work-safe order begins at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday and is in effect until April 3, according to both Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.

It requires everyone to remain at home unless they are conducting essential business such as grocery shopping, picking up food or going to work at businesses that are deemed essential.

Public and private gatherings outside of a household or single living unit are prohibited. {I mean...what the actual F**K!!!}

Parks remain open, but the use of benches, playgrounds and workout equipment is prohibited.

The order also requires everyone to maintain social distancing of at least six feet.

Grocery stores and gas stations remain open. Restaurants can operate, but only as a take-out option.

People who violate the order can face a fine and up to 180 days in jail, but Hidalgo said law enforcement agents will exercise their discretion on whether someone will be charged.



So my question to the lawyers of our community here...exactly what part of this is CONSTITUTIONAL?? I don't have work out equipment in my house, so I have to rely on cycling and tennis to maintain my cardiovascular health PER MY DOCTOR'S RECOMMENDATION. So I go play tennis with some friends in their neighborhood. Are the cops LACKING THAT MUCH with something to do that they'll "order" us home?

Call the court where you are ordered to appear. Ask them what to do. Courts have websites, too - you can look up your court and there will probably be a notice about how to handle appearances.

As for constitutionality - the states have broad police powers to regulate for the health and welfare. Cases in the '20s determined that mandatory vaccinations (which are an invasion of the body - a serious step) were constitutional. If the regulation is closely related to addressing the problem at hand, and the restriction proposed is not excessive in light of the problem, stay-at-home orders are probably going to be constitutional. Since these orders have exceptions for essential functions, and are of limited duration, they may well be fine.

All your Bill of Rights rights have limits and can be infringed in certain ways, under certain circumstances. Even speech is not unfettered - you can't slander people or make false claims in business transactions. If freedom of speech were truly unlimited, slander law would not be valid.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
For new tickets, we're currently issuing court dates in July. The hope is that this will have blown over by then. But there's going to be a big backlog in the courts.

As for your other questions about the courts being closed, the AR Supreme Court issued an order to the lower Arkansas courts last week that only "essential" court hearings could be held for the near future, and those can only be done by phone or teleconference. They provided a list of 8 or so different types of "essential" hearings. So unless the hearing falls into one of the 8 or so exceptions (mainly dealing with probable cause hearings for new arrests, and emergencies like temporary orders of protection that can't wait), it is postponed to a later date.

Speedy Trial requirements (and most of the various other court hearing time limits) have some exceptions allowed by law, like when the defendant waives it, when awaiting certain court ordered assessments, or when "good cause" is shown to delay the hearing. A lockdown in response to a worldwide epidemic is "good cause" to delay a speedy trial.

Rogue, what are you/your dept. doing with registrations that have recently expired? Just curious as many town offices and DMV's have closed.

quote:

Originally posted by ftttu:

We never knew court dates in advance, but were notified of the date by the court..

That is jacked up...I started in 99 and we didn’t get computerized until 02-03 ( but we knew our schedules out to the end of the year) so we just used our day shift Monday and half the shift used Tuesday...once it got computerized the courts would just phone us or text us if someone was gonna plea not guilty, Officer came in from the beat and mostly the guy pled when the officer showed up..sometimes there was a small trial with no jury- felonies automatically went to superior court so those were things you went to and waited all day for your trial.

In your hypothetical, we are issuing citations with court dates in June. If you don’t show, they’ll issue a warrant. If by some miracle court wasn’t back in session by then, you’d be assigned a new court date further down the road.

I serve as a judge in 5 municipalities. In appropriate traffic cases, the prosecutor is offering reductions/pleas by mail. Criminal cases and unresolved traffic are being set out to June for arraignment. We have called defendants to let them know options.

For cases where arraignment has occurred and speedy trial rights are at issue, we will have a trial to the court following best practices for social distancing, etc. most trials have either settled or waived speedy, and thus will be set for the future.

We have no pending jury demands so that is fortunate. Other jurisdictions are simply setting Jury trials for late summer.