I have a pretrial hearing in the morning. For my own speeding ticket. Yeah, I should have just 1) paid the darn thing; or 2) hired another lawyer to take care of it (seriously, though, who are the lawyers who go through law school to defend traffic tickets?). I couldn't take defensive driving because it hasn't been a year since my last speeding ticket. And I couldn't get deferred adjudication over the phone--although that is what I am hoping for in the morning.
I'll admit that I'm a bit nervous. First of all, I have no idea what a pretrial hearing for a traffic ticket entails. Should I be prepared with my motions in limine? I can't figure out what I want to keep out. Should I have written discovery requests? There is limited discovery in criminal cases here, but when I interned in the DA's office we usually just allowed the defense attorney to copy the entire file.
I'm not usually nervous about going to court--but this is justice court. It's a different breed of animal and the regular rules don't apply. I've never even been inside a justice court. County court, district court, court of appeals, federal court--yep. But no justice court. And it's different when you are defending yourself.
I called today to see who the prosecutor is, but got nowhere. It's a satellite court and some poor soul gets randomly assigned there. Hopefully the poor soul will be nice to me tomorrow.
2 comments:
Good luck! What in the world is "justice court"? Is that like "traffic court"?
I guess it's like traffic court. It's mostly traffic offenses, but also handles small claims cases.
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