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Page 5124
Case against Lawyerdude dismissed after a year.
I won this case by demurring. Traffic court lies to you. They tell you that you have 3 pleas: guilty, not guilty, no contest. Wrong. You have many pleas. Here is the demurrer #5067 that I wrote at the very beginning of this case.
Update July 9th: On June 6 the Ventura city attorney appeared in this case for the first time. The case was then nearly a year old. The original fine was $75. I had spend 2 days in jail on the bogus warrants. I persuaded him to dismiss the case - but don't think that he would have dismissed had I not written the demurrer. Also, a criminal case needs a year to develop. If you go to trial before a year then you are on the fast track - the fast track to jail.
I drove 2000 miles from Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 3 days in order to make this court appearance. I was arrested earlier in the year on a bogus warrant issued in this case. I asked Commissioner De La Torre who issued the warrants. He said nothing. The ugly mean clerk in that court said loudly "the court issued them". Well, now that is a problem because a human must issue a warrant; it is not a ministerial task. Also, a warrant for failure to appear, pc 1320, may not be issued for failure to appear at the traffic case. Here is how they get around that. They issued an warrant and imaginary complaint charging me with failure to obey a court order, pc 166, as I recall. Problem: There were no complaint issued by anybody in any of the 3 alleged offenses that appear in the clerk's minutes. There is a real problem with traffic court in this area: they don't issue complaints and the court clerks are the prosecutors. This is what caused this year long delay. The case papers (8 of them were in the file - court clerk stuff) called the case "People v Palaschak" and the district attorney Holf answered at the arraignment. Thereafter they denied responsibility for prosecuting.
Previous report:
On 6 September I challenged Ventura's no-sleeping-in-your-car statute in court 14 in Ventura. I waited all morning. Finally the court reporter left. Only then did the judge (a former local district attorney) call the case. He said that my papers were not in the file. I assured him that I filed them personally on time. The district attorney said that she knew nothing about the case. The judge volunteered that I should notify the city attorney. I explained that I suspected it was a city attorney case but the district attorney appeared once. The judge said that it was likely a courtesy appearance, but Deputy D.A. Holf did not say that she made a courtesy appearance. Furthermore, the procedure is and always has been to substitute in or out of the case.The judge continued the case. I reviewed the file. There was no complaint in the file. Therefore I would have difficulty knowing who is prosecuting the case. The 8 clerk-generated papers say that the plaintiff is "The people of California". I think that they are represented by the district attorney.
Immediately after court I walked to the clerk's office. After some effort I found a clerk. She searched and found that they had failed to file my papers. They were in the stack to be filed. She said that she would put a note in the file..
One of the flaws of Ventura court is that the clerk's office prosecutes traffic tickets. I complained about this for Melvin Looser in brief #2871.
Back to the no-sleeping-in-car statute: Here is my brief #5067 challenging this unconstitutionally overbroad statute which I filed on 2 August 2001. Whoops. I have a change to work on 6 September. I asked the court by mail late Tuesday (after labor day) 4 September to continue it in Continuance Motion #5099. The Supreme Court outlawed statutes that vest unbridled discretion in the police. The reason was taught to us well in Shuttlesworth v Birmingham 382 US 87 - my document #5089 in which the court said that the particular statute in that case was used to permit the police to discriminate on the basis of race. Said the court: "It results in a regime in which the poor and the unpopular are permitted to stand on a public sidewalk . . . only at the whim of any police officer."
Here is the catch 22. The district attorney won't prosecute the case and the city attorney failed to appear and failed to file a response to the demurrer as did the district attorney. I have spent 2 long mornings in court on this case.
Although the district attorney won't prosecute, they will prosecute a failure to appear -which has a more serious penalty, although it is manifestly unfair for the penalty for failure to appear to be higher than the penalty for the underlying crime - and to use it in this way to escalate the crime is a trick that they used to get me disbarred on a minor traffic ticket - like the speeding ticket in Valencia that I challenged many years ago.