bjcsc said:
Representing yourself in a case of any magnitude would be suicide. Judges were all practicing lawyers, and if you don't pay into the circle and keep it all going they'll pound you. As was said, if you think logic applies to any of it - it doesn't. If you think that it will be fair - it won't. If you think that people, even public figures, won't lie on the stand - they absolutely will and the judge will tolerate it.
Not always true. But maybe traffic cases are different. And maybe I was lucky that day.
A few years back, I was at my desk one morning when I was paged to come up to the front office. When I got there, there stood a police officer. Apparently, some guy had called the cops on me during my early morning pre-dawn drive to work and told them that I had been tailgating them, speeding, and then cut them off, the MORNING BEFORE, and saw my truck the following morning and saw where I pulled in, so called and filed a report.
I got a ticket for reckless driving because this guy wanted to press charges.
Well, after a few preparatory phone calls with my lawyer, and a month of stressing about this stupid court date, I compiled as much info as I could, before my day in court came (I had turned down a plea deal since I was convinced I hadn't done anything wrong).
So it was me against the Assistant DA, the "accuser", and the cop that wrote up the ticket. The ADA handed me a few papers with hand drawn maps with notes, etc all over it that the accuser had put together, and had all sorts of questions for the guy and the female cop when they were on the stand. I'm sitting there crapping my pants because 8 cases before me ended up with the accused getting nailed for all the charges, fines, points, and the additional court fees because they decided to fight it out in court.
When I looked at the papers I was handed, a few things stuck out - the troublesome truck was a slightly different color, had 10th Mountain Division license plates, and was an F350 extended cab. Suddenly, I realized that all those years of watching shows like Law & Order might just pay off - I was going to focus on the technicalities - the slightly different color of my truck, the similar looking plates from an in-state University, that it is an F250, and is a 4 door crew cab. So when it was my turn to question the accuser, I asked him if he was sure of the plates, the F350 emblem, and the extended cab. He walked right into my trap, and answered that he was positive of those details. After asking him 2 more times if he was absolutely sure that it was an F350, he became even more confident that he was right and that he had me by the ****, and was sure of what he saw, without a doubt. I even asked if maybe it could have been an F150, or F450 (I purposely left out the word F250), and he assured us all, especially the judge, that he saw the F350 emblem clearly.
I turned to the judge, and said that the accuser had the wrong vehicle, and explained the different license plates, the different color, the 4 doors of the crew cab, and the big one - that my truck was an F250, not an F350. At that point, the ADA began backpedaling, and started talking about all the different custom plates that look very similar and are hard to distinguish, and the almost non-discernable difference between the F250 & F350 badging.
When the judge rendered his decision, he complimented me on how well I presented my case, then began to rip the ADA up one side and down the other because she was so sure of what the details were until I started picking everything apart. It was all I could do to keep the smirk on my face from growing too big as he scolded this over-zealous ADA for wasting everyone's time with a poorly prepared case that was obviously strewn with innacuracies. He dropped all charges against me, and my clean driving record stayed that way. As the ADA and accuser were standing in the courtroom with their mouths hanging open, the officer ran out behind me to congratulate me on presenting such a good case, and being so well prepared.
