This post is already awesome. The title alone is not only a legal thing, but also a Scott Pilgrim thing. I am the master of word play. It is me.
So last Tuesday I went to court. "Now Jim, you're such an upstanding why would you ever need to go to court?" you ask. Well friend, I was LIDAR'd speeding in Gardner. A tragic tale, I assure you. Feeling as it was my duty to get my day in court, I decided to fight the ticket. I mean really, worst case scenario I have to pay my ticket, which I'd have to do anyway. So I decide to go to court.
So the night before I look up a few ways of getting out of the ticket, and long story short, I stayed up until 4AM writing cross examination questions. I basically would have destroyed this Officer's credibility.
I say would have because what I didn't know, is that in Massachusetts I don't get to confront my accuser. Instead of the age old way of having your officer show up (or hopefully not show up) and take your case in front of a judge, you go in front of the Court Magistrate, after paying a 25 dollar filing fee, and some old Officer sits in the witness stand and reads the original Officer's report of the incident. Not knowing this, most of my cross examination questions were reduced to little pointless jabs at this (presumably) innocent Officer. And being under oath I couldn't lie about the incident (morals!) and inevitably, my motion to be found Not Responsible was denied. But they did drop down the fee, which was nice.
However then I was told that if I didn't like the finding, I could pay 50 bucks, then do the whole Judge thing, and they'd then subpoena my citing Officer. But at that point, I'd skipped class and driven an hour to the court house, and waited another hour for my hearing only to be found Responsible, and to be honest, that's a lot of stuff to be hit over the head with mid-October, when I should just be living it up at school. So I'm not doing the second hearing cause in the end, it'll probably be the same finding, and let's be honest, if the cop used a Laser enhanced Radar gun, and tagged you as speeding, you were speeding. Which unfortunately I was. So next time you're fighting a speeding ticket, at least in Massachusetts, unless you were paying some huge fee (like I was) or you actually weren't speeding, especially if it's an hour away from where you live, and you have to drive there on a b-e-a-utiful fall day, it's not worth it. Save the gas money.
