06-22-2018, 03:03 PM
(06-22-2018, 02:41 PM)Viewfromthe42 Wrote:(06-22-2018, 12:26 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: That last bit is unfortunate. The hearing should be local to the location of the offence. If the officer can be in Toronto to write the ticket they can be in Toronto again to be at the hearing. In this particular case I doubt if any injustice was done but as a general rule people should not be forced to travel to distant locations by the justice system.
I don't know. My only speeding ticket was in Quebec doing exactly 20 over the construction limit (construction was pylons, not one person or piece of equipment), while being passed by cars with Quebec plates. If I wanted to contest the ticket, I would have had to go almost to New Brunswick.
Good point. My point was just that the Toronto red light runner who was caught in Toronto by a Waterloo officer should not have to go to Waterloo to contest the ticket, just because the officer was from Waterloo. I didn’t really mean to express an opinion on the opposite situation where somebody from afar is ticketed by a local officer.
I agree that your situation sounds questionable: maybe, just maybe, you were ticketed because unlikely to contest?
But really the whole way ticketing works should be different now. Given the ubiquity and lack of expense associated with video recording, I would expect most traffic tickets now to have documentary video evidence associated with them. A prosecution should pretty much consist of playing the appropriate video to the court; then the defendant can contest it by showing their own video revealing that, for example, they swerved to avoid the car in front of them or whatever. For speeding, being below the 90th percentile should be a defense — there is no justification for ignoring the worst offenders and only ticketing the out-of-province drivers. It should also be much easier for police and prosecutors to be disciplined for inappropriate prosecutions. I’m not sure exactly how this should work but the goal should be that ordinary people just going about their business don’t have to worry much about being dragged into court, while the real offenders who actually have a bad effect on safety get an appropriate response. As part of this it goes without saying that an officer who does something like break a taillight and then ticket for broken taillight should be fired and blacklisted, permanently banned from being employed in law enforcement or security. Some behaviour is so egregious that it shows the person to be fundamentally unsuited for the job.