The Response to the Initial Request for Discovery

May 29, 2000

This response to my informal request for discovery was composed by the court clerks' office on May 23, metered for mailing on May 26 as shown below, and delivered to my home on May 29.  It would appear that the delay in metering and mailing is due to the fact that the Traffic Court accumulates large batches of mail over a number of days in order to take advantage of bulk-mail postage rates, judging by the 27.5 cent postage on the envelope. It's all part of the big speeding-ticket money mill that the NMA frequently derides. Saving a few cents each on thousands of speeding tickets adds up to real money with which the police can buy new radar guns for writing thousands more speeding tickets.

Envelope showing meter date of 5/26
Envelope showing meter date of May 26

The clerk who received my informal request for discovery, after ignoring the fact that it was addressed to the District Attorney of the Traffic Court, apparently siezed on a single sentence within it, where I was requesting a trial by written declaration form, and ignored all the rest of the letter.  As I was to later discover, the informal request for discovery never even made it to the District Attorney's office.

Trial by Declaration forms, Page 1Trial by Declaration form, Page 2Trial by Declaration form, Page 3
The three pages of the San Jose Trial by Declaration form, dated May 23
(Click on each image for a larger view)

After reading the terms and conditions on page 2, I decided against filing a TBD, despite my success with that approach for my wife's speeding ticket in Fremont, California.

At the time, I wasn't certain that I wouldn't subpoena the father who was playing catch with his son in the front yard of a nearby house. They and their ball game were mentioned by Officer Jackson while he was scolding me for driving too fast.

The only time I ever saw them playing in the front yard again, on my daily late afternoon trips past their house on my way home from work, was the second (and only other) time I saw a motorcycle officer was monitoring speed in the same location. That made me quite suspicious that there was some kind of arrangement with the officer, designed to provide additional weight to a CVC 22350 accusation, and that perhaps the father was one of the instigators of the stepped-up enforcement and eventual photo-RADAR posting on this street. As it turned out, I never pursued that angle, but at the time, it was a consideration in deciding against filing the TBD.

And as it turned out, this was a key component of my success in this case, since my dismissal turned on a technical point of law that would never have come up under a TBD.

Little did I know that this "ignore 99% of the letter and the actual addressee" foul-up was only the first of a six-month-long series! The next step, after waiting through the 15-day limit provided in Penal Code Section 1054.5(b), with no response to my request for discovery in sight, was to "seek a court order" for discovery.

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