Re: Man With Suspended License Joins Court Zoom Hearing While Driving

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

Jun 1, 2024 at 10:27:02 AM PDT, Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

"Michigan Friend of the Court" is the intermediary between the court and
the state child welfare bureau. He needed not just the judge's order but
paperwork from this office to file with the state's driver's license
bureau. While there is an automatic process in which the driver's
license bureau notes that there is a suspension due to a judge's order
or other court action, there is no automatic process lifting the
suspension

Isn't that f'n convenient. They can bother to set up the bureaucracy to
automatically notify them when you're punished but they have no time or desire
to do the same to notify them when it's over.

Fucking government...

Plus, I'll bet he paid a huge fee to "Michigan Friend of the Court" to
process paperwork that they failed to follow through with.

My state set up this great process for child support. Deciding that
every father is a deadbeat dad, the only way child support payments
could be made is through a levy on his paycheck. It all went to a state
contractor who sat on monies for up to a year and a half before
dispersing them to the mothers. It wasn't optional for cooperative
fathers, who even if they were willing to pay the mothers directly had
no cash to spare.

And I'm sure there were mandatory fees.

Lehto made the same point you did. Make it an automated system to
receive the court order lifting the suspension. Even if the driver must
follow through by paying a fee, there's absolutely no need to wait to
lift the suspension from his record immediately.

(if there isn't something else on the record suspending the
license) because the driver's services bureau may also impose its own
fee to process paperwork lifting the suspension in their database.

I recently had a problem renewing my registration because the DMV system said
I had tolls I couldn't possibly have incurred and I had the proof to show
them. So I had to leave the DMV and go downtown to the Metro Toll Authority
because of course the DMV can put the block on, but they can't take it off.
Only the toll people can do that. Of course. They grudgingly took the tolls
off my record and lifted the registration bar, but they still charged me a
$125 'processing fee' to do it.

So I was completely innocent of the violations they claimed, yet I was still
out $125. And the only way to challenge that is to pay it up front then file a
series of appeals, all of which come with their own fees. And the cherry on
that shit sundae is that you know that in this age of computers and internet,
the 'processing' they're charging the fee for happens instantaneously in the
background with one computer talking to another. No human being has to do
anything, no man hours are involved, the Metro Toll Authority is out no money,
and so there's no justification for charging the fee to reimburse the state
for anything in the first place. It's just a convenient way for them to say,
"Now that we have you trapped here, we're just gonna reach into your wallet
and take some more money they we're not entitled to and good luck doing
anything about it."

That's absolutely outrageous. I'm sure it was entirely their fault. The
license plate reader matched plate numbers but not plate type nor which
state issued the plate. We've heard plenty of times of toll violations
issued to the owners of vehicles never driven in that state, and auto
owners receiving citations that should have gone to a trucking company.

When Mayor Richard M. Daley instituted kangaroo court here in Chicago,
er, I mean, the municipal hearing process for violation of municipal
ordinances, same thing. There was no practical way to appeal to state
trial court because they kept the fines low enough that the court filing
fees weren't worth paying.