gwax's rumblings

Or, if you pre­fer, how I got a park­ing ticket reduced from $35 to $14:

So, about a week and a half ago I got a ticket for park­ing my car within 30 feet of a stop sign. I was, in fact, parked about 2 feet from the stop sign. I was, of course, unaware of the law, which is not an excuse for break­ing it. In my neigh­bor­hood, some stop signs are marked no park­ing within 30 feet but oth­ers are not. I fig­ured the lack of posted signs might be some­thing that I could use; due process and all.

Being a law stu­dent, I have access to var­i­ous elec­tronic legal resources so I set about explor­ing Minnesota case law to see if I might have a valid argu­ment. Eventually, I found a case with a fact pat­tern much like mine; some guy was parked in one spot for more than two hours in vio­la­tion of a Minneapolis ordi­nance even though there was no mark­ing. Unfortunately, for me, the guy in the case I found lost. Then, at the end of the opin­ion, I found this:

Finally, it is defendant’s posi­tion that the enforce­ment of the ordi­nance is uncon­sti­tu­tional because of the fail­ure to post signs which indi­cate the time lim­i­ta­tions in par­tic­u­lar zones, more espe­cially the restric­tions gov­ern­ing the area in which he was parked. It appears that in some parts of the city the 2-hour lim­i­ta­tion is posted and in oth­ers it is not, a sit­u­a­tion which, defen­dant asserts, uncon­sti­tu­tion­ally mis­leads the pub­lic. In the absence of an express pro­vi­sion in a statute or ordi­nance requir­ing post­ing, we are of the opin­ion that the neces­sity for such notice is a mat­ter of admin­is­tra­tive or leg­isla­tive judg­ment with which the courts will not con­cern them­selves, notwith­stand­ing the public’s acknowl­edged habit of rely­ing on signs of this char­ac­ter in actual practice.

State v. Perry, 269 Minn 204, 208 (1964).

In there, near the end, there was one glim­mer of hope, specif­i­cally “notwith­stand­ing…”, which said to me that if I could show a pub­lic habit of park­ing close to unmarked stop signs but not oth­ers, I might have a chance. I fig­ured it at a really long shot but one that would be fun to try argu­ing in court. Over the course of the fol­low­ing week, I noticed quite a few cars parked just as would help my case.

Finally, today, I got around to going down to the Hennepin County Government Center to argue with a hear­ing offi­cer. After an inter­minable wait time, as is cus­tom­ary with gov­ern­ment offices but could be avoided by mak­ing an appoint­ment, I got to speak with a hear­ing officer.

Hearing Officer: The ticket says you were two feet from the stop sign.

Me: Yeah.

HO: You’re not dis­put­ing that?

Me: Nope.

HO: *per­plexed*

Me: Well, see, in State v. Perry, the Minnesota Supreme Court…

HO: Stop! I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to hear this. If you want to prac­tice, I’m more than happy to set up a court date for you.

Me: Ok.

HO: I can also change this ticket down to $14.

Me think­ing to myself: My case is weak and get­ting it dragged down to $14 is suf­fi­cient to prove that I can play the sys­tem. That and, more impor­tantly, since I’ll be done with term and back in Massachusetts in about a month, set­ting up a court date would likely be a huge pain in the neck.

Me: I can do that.

HO prob­a­bly think­ing to him­self: That saves us lit­i­ga­tion costs.

End result: I save $21 and score a moral victory.