Editorial | Shed light on faded traffic tickets

Traffic Court Judge Nicole Kellier’s advice to motorists who received traffic tickets is clearly well-intentioned and seemingly in their best interest.

The document, she said, should be copied to a more permanent format so that it is legible when being presented for payment, if their intention is to pay the prescribed fine and avoid having to attend court to plead the case.

But the judge’s advice, it seems to this newspaper, gives the Government a free pass on its obligations, and places an undue burden on citizens. Perhaps some motorist who receives a traffic ticket and is faced with the situation such as she raised, will, as a test case, challenge any prosecution against them under the Road Traffic Act.

Under the new road traffic law, Jamaicans, if they are ticketed, have 30 days to pay the fine, failing which they either turn up to court to fight the charges, or plead guilty if not paying the fine was because of inadvertence or some other circumstance.

But according to Ms Kellier, the senior judge at the Kingston Traffic Court, it is not uncommon for people who attend her court to claim that by the time they reach a tax office to pay the fine, the information on the ticket has faded. The business, therefore, cannot be concluded.

Her advice: “...Have it photocopied as early as possible. Take a photograph of the ticket, and so within the 30 days that you have to pay this ticket, you would have some information to present to the Tax Administration of Jamaica.”

Fair enough! For the most part.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

There are, however, two significant unanswered questions flowing from this suggestion, one of which we have already raised: the obligation of the Government. The other is whether a clerk at the tax office would be legally obliged to process the transaction – and on what authority.

A police’s ticketing system, from a law-enforcement standpoint, is far more efficient than what was in place up to early this year.

Under the old paper-based arrangement, police officers manually wrote up offences in assigned ticket books. At the traffic headquarters, that information was entered into a database, to which the tax authorities had access to verify payments. There were often delays of days between the writing of the ticket and when it was available in the database, which meant that people sometimes turned up to pay their fines and discovered that there was no information on which to do so.

Now, the database is updated in real time. Or it should be. A traffic officer, who decides to charge someone, remotely logs into the database and enters the information. His hand-held device immediately churns out a copy of the information for the presumed offender. The cops may even discover that people whose names are entered into the system have outstanding traffic tickets, or are wanted for non-traffic-related offences.

THERMAL PAPER

The problem is that the receipts issued by the police are on thermal paper, a generally fast and efficient method of printing that is widely used by businesses with high volumes of transactions, such as point-of-sale machines at supermarkets and stores, and in banks. The downside is that thermal paper printing, which brings up the printed image when it is impacted by heat, is also sensitive to light. It tends to fade relatively quickly when exposed to the general environment – which explains why supermarket and automatic banking teller receipts fade so fast.

The best place to store documents printed this way is, somewhere that is cool, dark, away from light and harsh environments. Which, unfortunately, but for Ms Kellier’s intervention, is not information generally told to consumers.

However, even as we accept Ms Kellier’s advice in the spirit in which it was offered, it is not unreasonable to expect that when the key law-enforcement arm of the State gives someone an official document, and a specific period on which to act on that document, that the document should remain in a condition capable of being processed up to the date set for its negotiation. An additional burden should not be imposed on the holder of the document, apart from what would be generally expected as normal due care. This is a question that ought to be addressed by the police and the national security ministry.

But should a traffic ticket holder follow Judge Kellier’s advice and turn up at a tax office with, say, a digital copy of his ticket, but no original, would that person be on good legal grounds in insisting that the ticket be processed? Or if that person goes to court with a faded traffic ticket, having been to pay the fine within the appropriate time frame, but was denied service at a tax office for the same reason, would that person still be liable for an offence? If he were, that, some people would argue, would be manifestly unfair and not in keeping with justice.

At the very least, these issues are in need of clarity.