Parking Ticket
A few weeks ago, I received a "Notice of
Delinquent Parking Violation" from the Parking Violations Bureau of Los Angeles,
CA. This was the first I had known I had received a parking ticket in LA, since
I live in San Jose, some 400 miles North of LA. I was not in LA at the date and
time of the original citation, nor in fact at any recent time. Nor was my wife
there. In particular, the automobile in question (a 1997 Toyota Camry XLE) was
not in LA then or at any other time in the 8 years we've owned the
car.
The date of the apparent violation
is October 11, 2005. On that date my wife, who is the primary driver of that
vehicle, used it to drive to her job at San Jose City College. She usually
arrives at work at 7:30; she usually leaves work after 5:00 PM. The time of the
citation (2:43 PM), she was teaching one of her classes, and the car was (we
presume) sitting in the staff parking lot at San Jose City College. I can, of
course, only presume that, since it she had parked it there in the morning and
it was still waiting for her to drive home in that evening. I think it's a
physical impossibility for someone to have gotten that car to LA in time to park
it on Pico Blvd. long enough to run the meter down and then get it back so my
wife could use it to drive home.
The
big mystery is how my car in San Jose became the subject of a parking violation
in Los Angeles. One large clue is that there were two citations issued: one for
the parking itself, and another for "Display of Plates." The citation is not any
more specific, but I suppose it may mean that the car that was cited wasn't
showing any plates at all. In which case, the officer perhaps wrote the vehicle
identification number down and used that to look up the vehicle in the DMV
records. All it would take is a single error in transcription to get the wrong
car. If the officer notes the car is a white Toyota, and the DMV record for the
(incorrect) VIN he supplies to the DMV database comes back as a Toyota, the
officer might well think he got the correct
vehicle.
The next big mystery is how to
fight this erroneous citation. The first step is to request an administrative
review of the citation. This simply means: they look at the citation and see
whether it correctly describes the vehicle according to the DMV records.
Unfortunately, this step did not fix things for me, DMV description and the
citing officer's description appear to have matched close enough (though: my car
is not white, but the citation describes it as a white Toyota). I suspect that
the administrative review process is pretty rough, as there almost certainly is
little incentive to find in favor of the defendant in cases like
this.
The next step, which I'm about to
embark on, is a request for a hearing. The hearing can be in person or by
written declaration. I will be requesting a hearing by written declaration as
soon as I can collect the necessary evidence that I am not the person nor is my
car the car they cited. The burden of proof appears to be on me (never mind the
U.S. Constitution, I guess), and the standard of proof is "a preponderance of
the evidence." The city's evidence is the citation itself. I have to overwhelm
that with my evidence: that I was not in LA at the time cited, nor was my wife.
That we had possession of the vehicle in question in San Jose at the time, etc.
I think I can produce sufficient evidence of those facts. Whether it will
convince the hearing officer is an open question. One of the prerequisites to
requesting a hearing is that you have to pay the outstanding fine. At that
point, the City has your money, and has virtually no incentive to find in a
defendant's favor whatever the facts. So I hope to win this round, but I don't
necessarily expect to.
But I'm going to
fight it. If I have to hand them money under this legalized extortion scheme, I
am darn well going to make them work for it!
If the hearing goes against me, there
is an appeal process. I hope I won't have to use that, but I will if I have to.
'Cause, darnit! I want to make them work for that money....
Posted: Sat
- December
17, 2005 at 09:52 PM