On the back of your ticket, which you received so long ago, it simply stated you had 15 days to pay or plead out and await a trial. No notice is ever sent you after receiving a ticket. The ticket was your notice.
Thank you for not reading. Like I said in the story, I decided not to just pay the full price at the time and instead await trial, so I could just get the sticker renewed before whenever the trial was set and just pay $10. I didn't count on the trial being set for ten months later, but I did finally find my old note that said October 15. So I don't know who was wrong, but I'm pretty pissed off.
At any rate, I paid the stupid thing online yesterday. Wound up being $221 instead. What fun.
But, to answer some questions- Federal Judges of all levels are appointed (and constitute most of the appointments a President has to make, hence all the fights over politicization of courts, but that's another story). But every state has it's own rules on how Judges are seated, and in Texas
all Judge's seats are elected positions (funny history about that, but whatever).
The actual seat I'm trying to fun for is called a Justice of the Peace, who handles traffic tickets, divorce courts, property disputes, and all that little stuff. There's several barriers to entry, not the least being nobody will tell you how to actually get on the ballot. Thanks to a professor, I got in touch with the right country offices. I need to file my submission in December, which I'm perfectly qualified for (resident of the county, over 18, registered voter -
that's it). If I want to run on a party ticket, I then need to survive their primary in January. Considering I've never even seen a Democrat listed on the ballot for any of these seats, I see no reason not to try that; I just hope Obama grows a pair by next November. Then it's just a matter of time.
As for decisions being overturned, provided it's not a Jury trial (which a JP's courts rarely if ever are), the presiding Judge is pretty much free to rule however he wants. Getting that overturned requires the losing party to give enough of a damn and spend enough money on a good lawyer to get the case appealed up to the next higher court, a process which takes months or years depending on how busy they are. And it has absolutely no effect on the authority of the lower court in question.
Now, in Federal courts and states where they appoint seats, a judge who makes idiotic or grossly questionable decisions can just be recalled by executive decision. But because Texas elects judges, aside from waiting four years to campaign against one, the only way to remove a judge is by impeachment. And you can guess how eager anyone is to do that. Although it is left to the higher appellate to hold the impeachment instead of the legislature, one renegade JP is still going to be way low on their list of priorities.
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Topic: Turns out I'm a fugitive. (Read 6360 times)