Get This Over With, I Tee Off in an Hour or What Happens When You Go to Your Minor Citation Court Date

So yeah, I picked this song, and that title because it sums up the look on the face of the guy behind the bench when I was at court this afternoon. And you know, pretty much everyone else in the courtroom too. This time I wasn't on jury duty, and he wasn't a judge, he was a "Judicial Hearing Officer." You don't get to keep a shred of paper from the process so I might be a little off on that.

This is where you end up when a police officer gives you that little pink slip after you've been sighted doing something minorly stupid or illegal, like double-parking, public urination, having a disorderly conduct, or any number of silly things and you get a court date instead a mail-in form to pay your fine.

Open container was a pretty popular citation, judging by the three or four people I heard ask one of the police supervising the line where they could just pay the $25. And a hell of a line too because only one window was open.

Me? Littering. Which was a rather uncolorful way of putting it rather than "trying to dispose of evidence of open container in an obvious and incredibly stupid manner." The cop had told me “That was the stupidest thing you could have done.”

Waiting was an effective way of keeping me nervous. I’d had a stomach ache since last night when I dropped a beer bottle and was certain it was an omen. This time was by mistake (and erm, not thrown) and as I picked my destroyed Newcastle bottle off the floor, I’d had the flash of "oh shit, the last time I did that, tomorrow it might end up costing me $50-400."

At the window, they check and see if you’re scheduled for the day, then you get a piece of paper that has the courtroom you’re supposed to go to on it. You head in with all the other people waiting to hear their name called. In lieu of a jury trial, you get your case heard by only a judicial hearing officer.

I had a good twenty people ahead of me so I got a sense of how it was going to go down. They call your name, and you stand up in front of the judicial hearing officer and a baliff hands him a photostat of the police officer's version of your violation. To the right of you is your court appointed attorney and I just bet that this is the duty you get when you piss someone off. Because basically his job seems to be, when the judicial hearing officer says what the penalty will be if you plead guilty, he repeats it back to you.

I wasn't too clear on what happened if you plead not guilty. Maybe it meant you got a court date set for an actual trial. Or maybe it meant that the judicial hearing officer would just decide whether or not you were guilty based on whatever argument you had against it. The people who plead not guilty went to the back of the courtroom to wait until everyone else from that batch was processed.

I was a huge wuss, and just wanted to get it over with, plus, hell, I was guilty, so I took the $25 fine and plead guilty.

I've just always been gutless as a gambler. Sure there was a chance that right then I could have just made up some bullshit, and the cop not being there, it would be scribblings in a notebook vs. my story. Then I would have saved $25.

But I felt like there was also a chance that pleading not guilty meant that I'd get some court date, it would drag out and if the cop did show up, I had no leg to stand on short of perjury. At which point I’m sure that if I were convicted by jury, they’d be so annoyed I put them through it that I’d get the max end of the fine, and I just didn’t feel willing to maybe pay $400 because I tried to save $25.

There's probably a really good social experiment in there. See how much people are willing to pay as a default fine. If the conditions are either to pay $X now and know that that's all you'll have to pay or enter into a contest where there's a 60 or 70% chance you'll have to pay nothing but a 30-40% you'll have to pay five or six times X dollars. I wonder how high X would have to be for most people to pick the contest.

A more paranoid person than me would see all these petty fines as just a source of revolving door revenue for the City of New York. They don’t really explain to people exactly what rights they have when contesting these tickets. The video you watch when you're standing in line pretty much just tells you which courtroom to go to and the names for the people in the court with you. I bet lots of people, myself sadly included, are far more willing to fork over some smaller sum if the law says that they could charge us much more for our outdoor summer brews and being seen by a cop while acting stupid. I wonder what the stat is for how often citations are contested. Or how often there's a conviction when people contest them.

After all, if I'd contested my ticket, it isn't like they'd bring out twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against me. (Thanks, Arlo) It's probably a case where the cop comes in if he's not doing something that day and his boss tells him to and tells his recollection of events. At best. Then either the jury acquits and NYC loses some court costs, or it convicts and the judge, annoyed at wasting his time on Johnny Mack's drinking problem tosses him a heavy fine.

But you know, maybe it is a quality of life thing. Because sure, we don’t want to live in a New York City where people publicly urinate and drink, and act disorderly with impunity. Oh, wait. That is the New York City we live in.

Just another mundane hustle. This is why I can't watch Law and Order.