Traffic ticket law. An underappreciated field. You rarely get published opinions in the area, and when you do, as here, they're usually from the Appellate Division.
But they're interesting. Plus, it's perhaps the most common arena in which people come into contact with the California justice system.
The question in this one is actually fairly straightforward. When you receive a traffic ticket, the officer generally writes (gives you a copy of) the ticket on a standard form prepared by the Judicial Council. If you want to plead guilty (or nolo contendre) and pay the fine, that's great, you can do so. No problem.
But there's a statute -- Section 40513(b) of the Vehicle Code -- that says that if plead not guilty, the case against you (i.e., the traffic ticket) can go to trial only if the traffic ticket "has been prepared on a form approved by the Judicial Council." Otherwise, if it's not, the prosecutor is required to file a traditional complaint against you in order to actually create jurisdiction.
So the question is this: What does Section 40513(b) mean when it says "prepared on a form approved by the Judicial Council?" Does it mean currently approved by the Judicial Council? Or does it instead mean ever approved by the Judicial Council?
If, as here, the officer writes you a ticket on an old form -- one that's been superseded -- does that qualify under Section 40513(b), or not?
Now, for me, taking the words of the statute at their face value, I would think that the statute means that the form has to be the current form, not one from a while back. If the Legislature cared enough to require that traffic tickets be on forms approved by the Judicial Council, they presumably wanted the current form used, not one back from the 1920s or so.
The Appellate Division, however, holds otherwise. Old forms are fine. At least when, as here, the differences aren't material. (Which, in truth, they'll probably never be.)
You can see why the Appellate Division might well come out that way. We generally don't care that much these days about the forms of pleading. As long as you get notice, we're generally cool with that. And we don't want to let people off traffic tickets just because officers aren't keeping their form books updated. We want the speeding public to be found guilty and such. Hence the holding here.
Still, I wonder just how far this reasoning goes. Is it really true that forms from the 1920s can be used, since they were, after all, at some point approved by the Judicial Council? The Appellate Division says it's not deciding that question, which I appreciate, but the question nonetheless remains.
Plus, there are other statutes and rules on the books that seem analogous. To take but one example I found, Rule 1.35(a) says that the Clerk is required to file (e.g., has no discretion to reject) "[f]orms approved by the Judicial Council for optional use." Clerks nonetheless routinely reject filings that are on old versions of the Judicial Council forms. Does today's opinion mean that's now impermissible? The words of the relevant provisions are pretty much identical, after all: those old versions were indeed "approved by the Judicial Council." Do Clerks now need to accept even old forms from the 1920s, or decide for themselves whether the variances are "material" or not?
Seems like an interesting issue. One that I bet comes up in practice pretty much every day.
To be determined.
