Editorial: Gov. Paterson should veto bill on traffic tickets

Text Size: A | A | A

For the second time in two years, the state Legislature has passed a bill that would undo the state police ban on having troopers appear in local courts and plea-bargain traffic tickets there. Gov. Paterson should do exactly what Gov. Pataki did when the bill reached his desk — veto it.

The ban, adopted in 2006, was a policy change, and a wise one. Before that, troopers who wrote the tickets regularly appeared in local traffic court, acting not only as witnesses but as prosecutors, making deals with speeders to plead guilty in return for a reduced charge like parking on pavement. That was a problem for two big reasons.

The first was financial. The state was wasting a lot of police resources — and taxpayers’ money — with troopers serving this role. If they took off from their regular shift to go to court, then the patrol suffered. If they went after their shift, as was common, they had to be paid at least three hours of overtime — even if they only took a few minutes to strike a deal with a speeder.

But it wasn’t just money, it was also the ethics of having the person who issued the citation also prosecute the case. That gives, as state police counsel Glenn Valle put it, “an inherent outward appearance of unfairness.” For one thing, it assumes the arrest is good and the trooper acted properly, where an independent prosecutor might have doubts in some cases. It also raises the possibility that the motorist might not get a fair shake — i.e. not get a plea-bargain deal, or the same deal that another would have gotten — if the trooper doesn’t like him for some reason, perhaps if he didn’t show enough deference at the traffic stop. There’s a reason that police and prosecutors work for different offices and have different roles and responsibilities. Here they are blurred.

While the ban served the interest of the state — and justice — it has made life difficult for localities, especially small, rural counties with small district attorney staffs. Some have had to use their scarce resources to hire prosecutors or designate lawyers to handle traffic violations — which many small localities rely on for a significant amout of their revenue.

Their concern is legitimate, as is their claim for more state money to prosecute these cases. Lawmakers should have provided additional funds, but didn’t. (Some of the money that was going to state police overtime could be used for this.) Nonetheless, Paterson shouldn’t allow a return to a bad system. He should veto this bill.

comments

July 11, 2008 8:06 a.m. [ Suggest removal ]

davidgiacalone ( no real name given ) says... FYI: Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield, of the Simple Justice weblog, agrees with your analysis and adds a few more points of his own at http://blog.simplejustice.us/2008/07/11/...

August 7, 2008 2:05 p.m. [ Suggest removal ]

asonofhendrick ( no real name given ) says... Subject: Should Troopers Prosecute? We have three branches of government. Executive, legislative and judicial. Its called the "Separation of powers." The trooper is in the executive branch of government, and the court/prosecutor is in the judicial. The Prosecutor may not act as a law enforcement officer and the officer, the trooper, cannot practice law. A judge cannot "practice law from the bench" such as acting as a prosecutor; this would be an automatic dismissal, as would the trooper acting as a prosecutor and thereby practicing law, would violate the separation of powers. Sounds like the legislators are ignorant.