[quote=spdrun]What’s the harm in submitting a declaration? It doesn’t go on your record till you’re convicted, so if you get convicted in six months, you’re saving insurance premiums. If you get acquitted, you get your money back.
(Though I prefer our system out here. You don’t pay a dime till you’re actually convicted of a traffic offense.)[/quote]
That is true here, as well, spdrun. However, the red-light camera tickets are ~$400 and up and the registered owner of the vehicle (RO) gets a bill with a photo of his/her license plate and the face of the driver mailed to him after his license plate is tracked down through the DMV. The contractor running the red-light cameras takes these photos for “documentary evidence,” which is submitted to the traffic court in the jurisdiction of the red-light camera.
The bill comes with instructions on the deadlines to fight it or pay the extortion amount and go to traffic school (at addt’l cost) if eligible.
No officer was ever present at the scene.
The identity of the driver and the position of the vehicle in front of the camera is for the registered owner of the vehicle to sort out. Meanwhile, the clock is running on late charges on the $400+ fine.
The “trial by declaration” is the means by which these “internet ticket-fighting mills” use to fight these tickets as the registered owner of the vehicle won’t be able to cross-examine a police officer at trial because there isn’t one. The registered owner can go to trial and bring in the actual driver of “their” vehicle (if they are cooperative) to say that they were driving (instead of the RO) but this won’t get the RO off the hook. The RO is responsible for the ticket (unless the vehicle had been reported stolen prior) because it was their license plate which was photographed running the signal.
With a regular traffic ticket written by a law-enforcement officer, a driver can take it into court in a timely manner, plead out and successfully get a judge to cut it in half (if they otherwise have a good driving record) by presenting a recent traffic school certificate to the court and offering to pay the entire bail amount that day. The court does this so they don’t further clog the traffic calendar and have to subpeona police officers for trial whose agencies are also short-staffed.
Not so with a red-light camera ticket. The owner of the vehicle is “guilty” and owes ALL of the bail amount … or they are not guilty and will get a refund of their posted bail from the court in a few months. It is all or nothing.
Red-light camera tix are a “gotcha” for the public in these times of CA’s insatiable need for more and more money flowing into the courts and DMV.
