Tickets are Bullshit

Everyone has a story about the guy they know who is a friend of a friend of the guy who beat a speeding ticket by fighting it in court, right?

It turns out that I am that guy, and so are countless other Houstonians. I’ve beaten twenty class C misdemeanor charges in the last five years in the City of Houston alone, so I have a pretty good idea of what I’m about to tell you. I’m not an attorney, just a regular asshole, so this isn’t anything that requires a degree in rocket surgery.

Thanks to an inefficient bureaucracy, a little bit of effort has saved me thousands of dollars whenever police officers try to extort me. Of course, the most important part is to remain silent when I deal with the officer. I don’t try to talk my way out of a fine by volunteering information or admitting I messed up. I know that no one is ever as smooth as they think they are, and that police officers have already heard every story in the book. I just sign the ticket and come back when it’s time for my day in court.

Texas law grants people the right to a jury trial in all offenses, even traffic citations, which are class C misdemeanors in most cases. The few hundred dollars I might be liable for pale in comparison to the cost of having a prosecutor try my case in a courtroom in front of a judge and jury, so merely pleading ‘not guilty’ and requesting a jury trial can quickly make it so that you are no longer worth extorting.

This sort of case is so common that Roberto De La Garza, a seasoned attorney with the Law Office of Paul Kubosh, estimates that in the past eight years, he’s probably tried at least two hundred cases, but stopped counting a long time ago.

“We encourage people to fight it,” he said of traffic citations. “Often we can beat the ticket by getting it dismissed, which can save people a lot of money.”

De La Garza further explained that many of the citations he sees are for victimless crimes, and that they are disproportionately issued to poor people. This is consistent with statistics that illustrate a nationwide trend of municipalities profiting from what many attorneys have begun calling “poverty violations.”

“Some of our clients can’t really afford to keep their vehicles registered and they need to get to work. If they stop driving, they can lose their job, and in a commuter city like Houston, that can be a tough hole for a person to dig out of,” De La Garza explained.

Putting people into this hole is, unfortunately, a big industry—so big that if you get a traffic ticket in the City of Houston, you can expect your mailbox to be filled with advertisements from countless law firms that specialize in defending people in traffic court.

As big as this defense industry is, the City of Houston lacks the necessary infrastructure to actually prosecute these cases. On any given day, as many as two hundred people can be set for trial in each of the eight courtrooms located in the Municipal Courts building on Lubbock Street, but each courtroom has time to take only one case to trial per day.

If this were not enough, the City can’t even get enough jurors to show up for the few trials it tries to run. According to Lilly Warden, Assistant Director of the Houston Municipal Court, about three hundred jury summonses go out on a given day, and only about twenty five to thirty percent of jurors actually show up. This is partly due to the fact that while laws are on the books to provide a penalty for not attending jury duty, the Municipal Court lacks the resources to do anything about people who decide to not attend. They’re so desperate for jurors to attend that the City even provides free Wifi, free parking, and cable TV for jurors while they wait, along with profuse thank-you’s from judges, prosecutors, and staff.

On the opposite side of the curtain, a defendant can expect that the court staff, bailiffs, and judges will repeatedly assert that you are in a real court with real prosecutors and real consequences, with the same shaky insistence of bill collectors who insist they can do more than just ring your phone incessantly. Histrionics aside, the math is clear. Eight courts with as many as 200 people per day can only try one person per day, without even enough jurors to accomplish even that much. The rest of the cases get dismissed or plead out, so the prosecutor in the room like a bear – you don’t have to outrun the bear, just the slowest person in the courtroom.

When I show up, I usually hire an attorney, and I expect to spend a good bit of time waiting. The system survives the way it does because it pushes its inefficiency on you. It’s basically a staring contest to see who is more willing to waste time to win the case. I bring a good book and smile in a way that lets the prosecutor know that I’m good to go all week, even if I’m not.

If the officer shows up, (and they often don’t) I eventually get called before the prosecutor. I don’t have to talk to this person under any circumstances, but they frequently try to intimidate me, lie, and make demands. It’s worth listening to any offers they may make, but I don’t like pleading as a personal rule, and it has served me well. Above all though, I know better than to discuss any of the details of my case, because it could be used against me.

Once I have a good idea of what is being offered, I sit back and wait for a while. The one time that I was called to actually go to trial, I asked for a continuance to allow me time to hire an attorney. The judge granted it without hesitation, and I came back a month later, only to have my case dismissed. So far, I haven’t had to pay a single penny in court costs or fines.

The courts just don’t have the infrastructure to handle actually pursuing the issue, and I’m willing to take advantage of that instead of allowing myself to be quietly exploited. Better yet, the more people are willing to fight their citations, the better the odds as the inefficient bureaucracy crumbles under its own weight.