One of the great legal dramas of our age
By Jim Dallas
I appealed a University of Houston parking ticket today. I was pretty worried that I didn't have enough points to make, and not enough evidence (one of my key points rested on a misunderstanding between myself and an RA, and so I was hoping to get a letter from him explaining our discussion to the Student Traffic Court). Sure I had photographs and had researched several Texas statutes*, but this was surely no way to run an appeal.
I showed up and started going down the points on my legal pad, sweating.
About two minutes into it, they just sort of looked at me funny and asked me to tell them why I should "get out of" the ticket.
So I did a quickie rendition of my arguments, and I was dismissed. A few minutes later they called me back in to tell me they had found me "guilty", but that I would get out of the fee.
I swear they were reading from a script. Is this what they tell everybody who makes a case?
Well, probably, but I learned an important lesson: University parking tickets really have nothing to do with abstract principles of justice.
* For those interested, I cited Subchapter E of the Chapter 51 of the Texas Education Code, as well as Chapter 12 of the Penal Code and Chapter 14 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. All of which are relevant to school parking tickets. Maybe you should consider looking them up the next time you get ticketed...?
Posted by Jim Dallas at November 10, 2004 02:21 PM
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