Wampum

Today's was the third time I've made an appearance at Department 3 at the Malibu Court, in the Western Division of Los Angeles County, and I've sat through most or all of four cycles of 50 cases per half-day. These are my personal observations:

1. the inability of Mexican nationals to obtain a California driver's license causes Mexican nationals to have to pay several hundred dollars more in fines and penalties than US nationals,
   
2. the fines levied for offenses are much, much less than the total monetary cost of accepting a reasonable plea offer, every overt amount should be multiplied by three or four, without taking any other form of cost into account,
   
3. the overwhelming majority of Mexican nationals processed in any session at the Malibu Court were operating vehicles that were either not currently insured, or otherwise cited for a vehicle defect, for vehicles registered themselves or to an employer, and are plead out in one appearance,
   
4. the overwhelming majority of US nationals processed in any session at the Malibu Court were operating vehicles while under the influence, or at speed or some similar form of dangerous recklessness and their cases, between alcohol treatment progress hearings, community service hours progress hearings, run to an order of magnitude more appearances,
   

The indirect use of the Vehicle Code to penalize Mexican nationals is a policy that should be discontinued. There is no benefit to making the operation of a motor vehicle a status offense, or making liability and comprehensive insurance unavailable to a class of motor vehicle operators, who except for the status offense of having a Mexican state driver's license, but not an American state driver's license, are otherwise indistinguishable from a risk pool management perspective.

The hidden cost of penalty assessments is a policy that should also be discontinued. Each person accepting a plea should be told not just the amount of fine, but also the amount of penalty assessment, and the use of secondary fines, the penalty assessments themselves, should be discontinued. Defendants accepting plea agreements which benefit the State vastly more than it benefits the defendants should not be told the full cost of "no contest" after they have entered a plea, at the clerk's office, when this knowledge could have been provided to them before they accepted the Court's standard offer for the offense charged.

John Edwards knows about poverty and he knows about courtrooms, though perhaps not the retail criminal court side as well as the complex civil litigation side. He's doing a poverty tour this week. So have I. I hope we can compare notes some day. I'm looking at people who are working to pay fines in the company town called ... Malibu, California.