Courts: Traffic Jam

There are 102 million drivers in the U.S., and 30 million of them will be charged with one traffic offense or an other this year. For most, the summons to appear in traffic court will provide their only direct contact with the trap pings and workings of formal U.S. justice. Few are likely to come away impressed. Says James Economos, director of the American Bar Association’s traffic-court program: “Our traffic courts are the disaster area of the judiciary.”

The courts are arbitrary and hasty, often indifferent to individual rights, and on all too many occasions actually inimical to them. In many, case-hardened judges display a clear presumption of guilt, leaving it to the defendant to prove otherwise. Every inducement is offered to encourage a guilty plea—notably, swifter trials and sometimes lower fines. In New York City, whose traffic courts are rated among the nation’s worst by the A.B.A., an accused driver must appear twice to plead not guilty—first to announce that he plans to do so, and then to appear for trial. After an all-day wait, he may be run through the trial in as little as a minute. But the city has agreed to change its time-consuming ways in September by allowing defendants to notify the courts by mail of their intention to plead not guilty.

Fees & Quotas. Traffic-court judges in all but five states need not even be lawyers. Twenty-three states still retain some version of the “fee system,” though the Supreme Court as long ago as 1927 indicated that it is unconstitutional. Under the system, the presiding judge, magistrate or justice of the peace is paid for every conviction—a practice that hardly encourages acquittals. In some states, to prevent abuses, the county pays the judge his fee for each case heard, regardless of the verdict. But even that safeguard does not always protect the hapless motorist. Policemen anxious for a high percentage of convictions often take offenders to the J.P. of their choice. If the J.P. wants the cops’ “business”—and the resultant fees—he had better be tough on motorists. Nor do the police mind a longer trip to a friendly justice. In Taylor County, Fla., sheriff’s deputies have been known to lie in wait for speeders as far from court as possible, then collect mileage for transporting the offenders to and from the trial.

Even judges who get no fees may be under pressure to convict, for traffic fines are an important source of local revenue almost everywhere. New York City alone takes in $20 million a year in fines, and in some jurisdictions traffic judges are told how much they must raise in a year. For a long time, many police departments had another sort of budget—a formal quota system requiring each cop to issue a certain number of tickets. Officially, the system has been abandoned, but if a traffic cop hands out too few tickets, he is likely to hear about it. In a few precincts, “totem pole” lists are kept. The man at the bottom rarely fails to increase his ticket total quickly.*

Blind Dozen. So clogged and overworked are many traffic courts that city officials despair of improving them. Detroit has tried to make the system virtually an administrative one, with “referees,” rather than judges, hearing the cases. But the courts remain congested. Besides, the A.B.A. argues that an administrative system merely serves to undermine legal justice still further. In Florida, however, the Dade County traffic court has demonstrated that a great deal can be done. In the wake of a 1959 ticket-fixing scandal in Miami, the court was completely overhauled.

Acting on advice from the A.B.A., Florida officials scheduled four traffic sessions a day. As a result no defendant has to wait more than 1½ hours for his case to be heard. Each Dade County policeman has a regularly scheduled day in court and makes his summonses returnable for that day. If a defendant wishes to plead not guilty, the arresting officer is present and the trial can take place immediately. Instead of merely fining offenders, Dade’s 13 judges may send them to traffic-safety schools, order them to undergo eye exanimations (a dozen of the 48 motorists examined in a recent week were found to be legally blind), or suspend their fines if they agree to spend the same amount on lessons at a private driving school.

For all the abuses of the system, however, determined prosecution of offenders can improve safety, according to the A.B.A.’s Economos. “This,” he says, “has been supported by experiences in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and many smaller cities.” It is equally clear that a well-run traffic court can achieve the same result. When James Ravella became the traffic-court judge in Warren, Ohio, in 1950, the city had a population of 50,000 and an auto-accident death rate of 13 per year. Judge Ravella patiently explained traffic laws and their importance to each defendant, also printed up pamphlets outlining defendants’ rights. “I feel my primary function is to educate, not punish,” he says. After 17 years of Ravella’s novel ways, Warren’s population has increased to 65,000, while its annual auto death rate has been reduced to four.

* If ticket totals fall off in Kentucky in the near future, it would not be too surprising. Last week a Louisville court refused to convict a motorist accused of attempting to bribe a policeman, for the simple reason that Kentucky had somehow neglected to make bribing a policeman a crime. Despite that discovery, no plans are currently under way to plug the loophole.