Question about a ticket cost Last week I was issued a ticket for "Operating Vehicle While Texting/Reading/Typing". It was a bs ticket since I had just pulled out of a parking lot and was merely plugging my phone in to charge it. Regardless, I probably don't have a shot at winning that since I was still looking down with a mobile device in my hand. My question is regarding the cost of this ticket. Ordinance 257.602b states it's just a $100 fine for the first offense. The magistrate told me it was going to cost me $240. I didn't pay it because her GPS was down and I don't carry around $240 in cash on me... The ticket was issued in Tuscola County, Michigan. I did a bunch of digging around and found this: http://www.14adistrictcourt.org/traffic_court/traffic_fines.html It shows $240 as the total for the ticket, which is ridiculous to begin with, but what is the difference in the Fine and Cost and what are SMCO and BLDG? How can a fine cost $100 but I end up having to pay $240?
Consider that stuff "court costs" or "court fees." They are actually often things not related to the court, like environmental fee, or emergency medical something or other, or park poop bag fee. Pretty much whatever either the legislature or administrative decision makers what to put on there. And FWIW, if you were not texting get your phone records and bring them to court to prove that you did not send any texts in or around that time.
Unfortunately, your chances are nil. There are panels on every metro station where tickets and fares are listed, and on those a summary of the conditions is posted and a pointer to where to get the full conditions: not only the web but also at the customer centers. Nonetheless, the ATM ticket conditions are also published at the DOGC, short for Diari Oficial de la Generalitat de Catalunya. That's where all laws are published and, although in reality almost no one reads that, whatever gets published there is assumed to be known for all citizens. It's the basis for the "not knowing the law does not allow you to not obey it" principle. By the way, the T-10 usage condition (or any other ticket that allows shared use like T-70/30) state that, if used by more than one person at once, all of them have to make the same exact journey: enter all at the same station, exit all at the same station.
Is odometer fraud a felony or a misdemeanor? It's both: a felony under federal law, and a misdemeanor under Colorado law. There's no conflict; each of those sovereigns can enforce its laws independently. Someone who tampers with an odometer could be prosecuted in federal court, and convicted of a felony; or prosecuted in Colorado court, and convicted of a misdemeanor; or even both. In practice, it sounds like the federal authorities are most interested in prosecuting large-scale odometer fraud schemes, and would generally leave one-off cases to the state authorities. Are there exceptions where this may not be enforceable? This site (https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/odometer-fraud) indicates that the requirement for a written disclosure of odometer roll-back is not applicable for vehicles over 20 years old (also pre-2010 models, which seems a bit more restrictive). I'm having a hard time nailing this particular restriction down in the Colorado Statutes. Can anyone point out where this law is defined? As far as I can tell, Colorado law simply incorporates the federal requirement: CRS 42-6-202 (5): It is unlawful for any transferor to fail to comply with 49 U.S.C. sec. 32705 and any rule concerning odometer disclosure requirements or to knowingly give a false statement to a transferee in making any disclosure required by such law. 49 USC 32705 (a)(5) permits the Secretary of Transportation (i.e. the federal Department of Transportation) to make regulations that carve out exemptions from the mileage disclosure rules, which can be found at 49 CFR 580.17 and include the 20-year and 2010 rules. So these same exemptions apply to the state requirement. (Incidentally, the Colorado title forms do not mention this exemption.) Note, however, that this is only an exemption from the disclosure requirement. There is no exemption from the general law against odometer fraud. It is illegal to tamper with an odometer no matter how old the car is. What is the statute of limitations to pursue crimes of odometer fraud? I think this is answered in Colorado Statute 13-80-102(j) (https://leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/files/images/olls/crs2020-title-13.pdf). This seems to indicate this type of fraud has a 2-year timeline. Does this apply from date of purchase or date of discovery? 13-80-102 is a statute of limitations for civil actions, and it does indeed cover actions for odometer fraud (see (1)(j) which references CRS 42-6-204). This would apply if the buyer wanted to sue the seller in civil court. But that's unrelated to the criminal statues we discussed above, which would be prosecuted in criminal court by the state or federal government. The limit is two years &quot;after the cause of action accrues&quot;, which is defined in 13-80-108(3): A cause of action for fraud, misrepresentation, concealment, or deceit shall be considered to accrue on the date such fraud, misrepresentation, concealment, or deceit is discovered or should have been discovered by the exercise of reasonable diligence. For criminal prosecutions, the Colorado statute of limitations for misdemeanors is generally 18 months, from the time the offense was committed (CRS 16-5-401). For some crimes, it is defined to start instead when the offense was discovered, but odometer fraud doesn't appear to be one of them; still, it could conceivably be prosecuted under other fraud statutes. As for federal law, the statute of limitations is generally 5 years from commission (18 USC 3282).
Sending a letter to the red light camera company or police department may or may not get the charge dropped before trial. But whether the charge gets dropped before trial isn't the important question -- after all, people sometimes do get charged wrongly -- rather, the question is, if it goes to trial, whether you will win. Since this question is about California, all traffic tickets in California, including red light camera tickets, are criminal cases (that's why the case will be named "People of the State of California v. [your name]" in court documents). The burden of proof is on the prosecution, and the standard of evidence is "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is no provision in California law to fine or otherwise punish the owner of a vehicle for a moving violation, except through a conviction as the driver who committed the violation. If you plead not guilty and it goes to trial, the burden will be on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the driver was you. If the driver in the picture does not look like you, there is no way they can meet that burden, and the court must find you not guilty. (In most cases the prosecution will immediately drop the case when they discover that the picture does not look like you.) Note that you have an absolute right to not testify in your own criminal trial where you are the defendant, so there is no way they can force you to testify at the trial about who the driver was if it was not you (which would be irrelevant to the case against you anyhow). If you do not say who the driver was, and the police department fail to guess who it was (e.g. by searching for drivers whose licenses share the same address as you for someone who looks like the one in the picture), then nobody gets fined or punished for the violation. This is true even if you know full well who the driver was, or even if you were pictured sitting right next to them. You don't need to claim not to know who the driver was, because whether you know or not doesn't matter -- you have no legal obligation to tell the identity of the driver even if you know, and you cannot be fined or otherwise punished for the violation if you intentionally refuse to tell.
Of course it doesn't work. You haven't discovered an end-around to property ownership I gave someone a car and want it back (they refuse) You no longer own this car. It is now titled in their name. Your interest in the car is now exactly zero whether or not they paid for it. I use a shell company to buy my own debt Okay. This has nothing to do with the car. You're now out of the cash it took you to set up this new entity. How are you doing this? I assume it means paying off your creditors with money you already have. You will also have to come up with some type of bogus documents that explain to the future court why this was even done. If you have the money, why do you have debt? My shell company sues me for conveying the car to conceal it from creditors Um, Ok. Now you're also out filing fees. Let's assume you know how to do this without paying an attorney to do it for you. I settle Makes sense, since you're suing yourself. The shell company now gets a court order to seize the car Seize the car how? This is a stretch. A judgement would be against you for the value of the car. You can't settle a lawsuit using assets you do not own. A court won't order something repossessed because of an unrelated squirrelly lawsuit. An exception would be a bankruptcy court that rules the item was sold or disposed of outside the court's orders. I would expect an astute court to hit you with contempt or sanctions for trying to use it to further your interests with some sort of end-around to property ownership. Expect more fees for this use of the court's time. The shell seizes the car No. Now I have the car back No.
Let's be quite brutal here. Inexperienced driver doesn't mean the driver made a mistake. Lots of friends in the car doesn't mean they interferred with his driving. Loud music in the car is totally legal. &quot;Perhaps was distracted&quot; - &quot;perhaps&quot; you were distracted by looking at the passengers of this car instead of yielding? It seems that you drove without due attention. You noticed at the last moment that you had to yield. &quot;Yielding&quot; isn't just stopping right at the last second, you have to drive in a way that it is visible for others that you are going to yield, and you didn't. The other driver was 100% correct to assume that you wouldn't yield. Then you come up with an accusation that a police officer was biased. That's a very, very strong accusation. It's impossible for you to prove. It's the kind of accusation that will cause the judge to believe that you can't accept your own faults, and that you need the maximum possible fine to make you realise your mistakes. That's why you need a lawyer. A lawyer will either make sure that you only say things in court that actually help your case. Or will advise you not to fight this in court at all, if that is better for you. If you go to court on your own, you'll only get yourself into trouble. And if there was bias by a police officer, and a witness lying, and a driver driving without attention, then a lawyer with experience in these things might be able to prove that it court, although that would be a very tough call, but you on your own don't have a chance in hell. You say &quot;the shop owner lied&quot;. The shop owner says &quot;no, I didn't&quot;. So what's your next step? You don't know. Your lawyer knows. That's why you need a lawyer.
To be very straightforward, yes, a police department would very likely have records of their past interactions with you in the form of police reports. They cannot just throw them away because it's been scrubbed from your public record. They detail the interactions the police officer had with you. That being said, those records would not show up in a general inquiry into your record, because those records are meant to protect the officer and the department as a reference point they can go back to in case some dispute arose in the future. If a police officer really wanted to find them, they'd have to do a bit of digging for them. The difficulty in finding them would depend on what system the particular police department uses to store those records. Smaller departments may just file them in a cabinet somewhere, whereas larger ones may actually have their own searchable database. But a traffic cop out on the street is only gonna see what you're seeing at the DMV - nothing. There is also a formal NCIC database, but traffic violations would never end up in there. That is a national database that basically stores red flag persons of interest (think stolen vehicles, sex offenders, and gang members). Sometimes multiple departments within a state will share their information with each other, but a department's database is usually kept to that department only. Also keep in mind court records. The court case that had a violation removed under such and such conditions is still gonna be a public record. Those records would generally be available to a judge overseeing your case so if you repeatedly end up in court for the same thing, they're gonna know and they're gonna stop scrubbing it from your record or offerring certain options because you're clearly not learning your lesson. Many laws allow you to have one offense stricken per year and similar stuff like that, but that kind of stuff doesn't just permanently disappear. They have to keep record of it in order to know you've already had your once per year etc. Also a note about parking violations: not all of those are actually issued by police. If it was issued by a private firm then that is not something that would ever show up on your record. It would just be in a database somewhere with whatever private firm issued the fine. Those kind of tickets get sent to collections and hurt your credit score if you don't pay them, rather than affecting your driving record.
Yes - they can charge a reasonable amount to cover collection, cataloguing, safekeeping and restoration of property. Crucially they aren't specific to just the costs related to an individual item, but rather the estimated income is weighed against the estimated costs of all lost property handling in that year. The legal basis for this comes from the London Transport Act 1982, subsequently amended various times (e.g. by The Transport for London (Consequential Provisions) Order 2003) but the original gives the gist in Part V, Section 19 : The Executive shall have power to fix the charges to be paid to them from time to time for the safe keeping and redelivery of lost property and the charges shall be of such amounts or at such rates as the Executive shall think fit: Provided that - (a) the total of the charges fixed under this subsection and estimated to be received in any year shall not exceed by an unreasonable proportion the cost to the Executive in that year of making provision for the safe keeping and redelivery of lost property ; Since you specifically mentioned the driver award this is further explained in TfL's Lost Property Fees documentation: Cab-driver award Items found in licensed cabs are subject to an additional award, which is given in full to the driver. This award takes into account the value of the item and the time taken and loss of fare in delivering the item to a police station or the Lost Property Office. Which is fairly sensible, cab drivers are only earning when their carrying fares. By taking steps to mean that they aren't out-of-pocket for turning in the lost items TfL is aiming to increase the number that get handed in rather than simply discarded, or in the case of valuable items simply kept. Which is in keeping with the goals of &quot;safe keeping and redelivery&quot; described in the Act. The legal basis for this award is in the London Cab Order 1934, Part VIII: (2) If any property found in a cab and deposited at a police station by the cab-driver be claimed within three months from the last day of the month in which the property is received at the Metropolitan Police Lost Property Office, and the claimant proves to the satisfaction of the Commissioner of Police that he is entitled thereto, the property shall be delivered to him on payment to the Commissioner of Police of (a) a fee in respect of the cost of collecting, keeping in safe custody, and restoring lost property ; b) an award to the cab-driver by whom the property was deposited; and (c) such additional sum (if any) as may be payable as hereinafter provided.