Comments on: A sliding scale for speeding tickets: is this even legal?

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:22:57 +0000

States that collect property taxes do so based on the value of the car—and few people complain about that. So, it wouldn’t be a great leap to base traffic fines on the value of the car.
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You owe property taxes on your car (in certain jurisdictions in Virginia) because it’s a consumer durable on which they have ready information. Registration, Blue Book, and invoice. The purpose of a fine should be to discourage certain sorts of behavior, not to raise revenue. It’s not analogous.

By: Ford Toyoda

Ford Toyoda — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 19:36:41 +0000

States that collect property taxes do so based on the value of the car—and few people complain about that. So, it wouldn’t be a great leap to base traffic fines on the value of the car.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:34:08 +0000

It is more productive for them to stay on the road generating ticket revenue than wasting time in court over a $150 ticket.
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It’s not productive for them unless they personally are getting the revenue or their promotion is influenced by tickets written (w/o regard to whether the state receives revenue or not).

By: Chases Eagles

Chases Eagles — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:59:28 +0000

Also, challenging your ticket in WA is probably going to win by default as the troopers stopped showing up in court, in my case, by the late eighties. It is more productive for them to stay on the road generating ticket revenue than wasting time in court over a $150 ticket.

By: Chases Eagles

Chases Eagles — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:50:00 +0000

Bill Gates once spent far more money fighting a speeding ticket than just the cost of the fine. This only hurts the middle class, as usual.

By: JohnTyler

JohnTyler — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:38:44 +0000

Nobody should be surprised at all about any loony, crazy policy supported by Gavin Newsom and the Calif. state legislature.
They are all committed leftist ideologues and in their minds everything they propose makes sense; is totally logical.

Don’t be surprised if electric and gas utility rates in Calif will be determined by one’s income. Ditto for auto registration, etc. etc.
There is no limit whatsoever that “income” determined prices and fees become the norm in Calif.

And you can bet that the citizens of Calif. will keep voting into office people like Newsom.

An aside; just as death and taxes are inevitable, it appears that the dumbpublicans in Washington are just beginning to break ranks – yet again !! – and thwarting Trump’s agenda.
As I have said many times, when it comes to politics, the dumbpublicans are just plain stupid.

By: sanforth

sanforth — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:14:11 +0000

Cornhead on April 2, 2025 at 6:23 pm said:

Might as well give lighter or heavier sentences based upon race. That’s next.

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Next? I thought that’s been going on for years if not decades, especially in the cities. It even applies to police officers charged with crimes too–the black Minneapolis officer who shot and killed a woman in cold blood who called 911 was out free after a short prison sentence, while Chauvin will spend the rest of his life in jail.

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:04:32 +0000

Another would be an automatic increase in fines for successive offenses. First offense $50, second is $100, third is $500, fourth is $1000, subsequent offenses are $5000. Or whatever scale you please.
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Use a formula. Also, do not state dollar values in the statue. Define the fine to be a function of nominal-personal-income-per-capita in the state and have annual resets per determinations of the state comptroller or like official. The boundary between small claims and civil disputes which go to superior court should be set the same way. If there is a lot of subregional income variation in the state, you can have multiple thresholds and multiple fine scale in the state. (New York and Virginia would be examples of states for which multiple thresholds might be advisable).

By: Art Deco

Art Deco — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:59:31 +0000

The quality of the legal representation you get, I would think, is segregated by income. The better lawyers are more expensive? So is the ability to make bail segregated by income.
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There are attorneys who include criminal practice among their lines of business, but most lawyers with experience in this realm work for the public defender’s office. We had a relation who thought hiring an attorney in private practice for his son was prudent. The youths in that quartet who made use of the public defender’s office got better deals. The lawyer he hired receives the bulk of his revenue from insurance cases. One thing state and local governments can do is to have a common pay scale for prosecutors and public defenders and hire 0.85 public defenders for every prosecutor you hire.
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Please note that bail is to encourage the accused to show up for his proceedings and not ditch the jurisdiction. The capacity to post bail is a function of how enmeshed you are in family ties, social ties, and business ties in the locality. If you’re concerned about the injuries preventive detention, you can have a standard scale of indemnities to compensate accused whose cases were not processed, or who were acquitted, or whose eventual sentence was less than the time they spent in preventive detention.

By: Hrefn

Hrefn — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 12:47:22 +0000

This is a horrible idea which is completely inconsistent with equality under the law. If you are concerned that speeding fines are insufficiently punitive to deter the wealthy from speeding, there are other ways to do this. One would be loss of license after three violations in a certain defined period of time.

Another would be an automatic increase in fines for successive offenses. First offense $50, second is $100, third is $500, fourth is $1000, subsequent offenses are $5000. Or whatever scale you please.

Justice is supposed to be blind. Once an offender is penalized not for what he has done, but for who he is, we have left the rule of Law entirely. Let’s shred the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence while we are at it. “All men are created equal” and the Fourteenth Amendment? Clearly obsolete.