Friend of the court...

[deathpixie]

That's the official term for the function I was performing today. "Friend of the Court". Old buddy, old pal, me and the court are tight, y'know what I'm saying?

*ahem*

When someone repeatedly fails to pay their fines, and ignores everything and has no property to seize, eventually a Penalty Enforcement Warrant (PEW) is issued. This effectively is a summons to attend court, where the nice magistrate will jail you at a rate of one day for every $100 you owe, unless you can prove exceptional circumstances why you've bollixed up every other chance you've had at paying this thing. When one of these (or 17 of them, as it turned out today) goes to court, Perin sends one of us registrars over to act as a kind of intermediary between the defendant and the court, explaining matters to both and assisting the magistrate as required.

This basically takes the form of talking to the sad sack, scaring the crap out of them by making it very clear they can go to jail today, and then trying to sort stuff out. And then standing up before the magistrate and announcing yourself and giving a summary of the case, and answering any questions he has.

I did my first PEW on my feet in front of the magistrate today. I felt so Law and Order-ly. Now all I need is the power suit.

Although, question: how can someone be so negligent about their personal affairs that they rack up $64000 worth of traffic fines and does absolutely nothing about it. The mind boggles.

Comments

[avariel-wings.livejournal.com]

$64000??? Good God. The question isn't so much how do they do nothing about it, the question is how bad a driver/stupid a parker/whatever it was they did wrong can this person be?

[deathpixie]

Using a toll road without paying the toll. Quite easy in Melbourne - our toll roads don't have booths, you get a little electronic beeper thing in your car instead. Or call for a day pass. But still, after the first fifty fines, you'd think she would have done something... She had something like 300 of the things.

Rossi dahling...

[redhawk.livejournal.com]

Stop hitting on the court. It doesn't think of you in that way. You're just _friends_. Sure, you'll go out and have a few beers after work, and there was that ONE time when the court got really drunk and the bench was _right there_...

Anyway.

Redhawk