Town Courts getting a closer look
The Kokomo Tribune is doing an indepth look at traffic enforcement, and they start off their series with a look at Indiana’s town courts. Under a long standing provisions, the judges in town courts are elected, but are not required to be attorneys. As a practical matter, most towns who can afford to operate a court, could not afford to employ an attorney for it, so the provision makes having a local forum for hearing ordinance violations and traffic tickets affordable.
However, the lack of legal training and experience can lead to questions about the propriety of the justice being dispensed by these courts:
SHARPSVILLE — Population, 618, Sharpsville covers less than one square mile between Kokomo and Tipton.Few people outside of Tipton County are aware of the town because of its remote location, but each year that number grows as people are funneled through the town court.According to state officials and judicial reports, Sharpsville Town Court has been processing and collecting almost double the revenue of city traffic courts 21 times its size.
What do you do if you think that a town court judge is acting inappropriately? With “regular” judges, they are barred, and hence under the authority of the Indiana Supreme Court, through the Disciplinary Commission. Apparently, the Commission accepts complaints about unbarred town court judges, but has not done anything with them as of yet:
Cindy Ables, a Kokomo resident, filed a complaint with the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications after being referred there by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She said she wants something done about the Sharpsville Town Court.Meg Babcock, council to the commission, said her office receives hundreds of complaints each year, but they have never filed charges against a city or town judge.
And unfortunately, like many in local government, the operators of town courts do not uniformly understand the basics of government operations, like complying with public records requests:
The Tribune attempted to gather information from court documents, but the Sharpsville Town Court denied two verbal requests for public information, a faxed request for documents and three mailed requests — all in violation of the Indiana public access laws. After several requests, the clerk did provide a limited media list of people who had been processed by the court.
June 24th, 2005 11:40
In Illinois, to solve the problem of expense, the local Circuit Court hires a full-time judge that travels to the smaller city and town courts to hold traffic court. The judge is paid accurately for his/her time and citizens know the person behind the bench knows the law. Because it is a shared judge the cost for salary and benefits is divided among all the smaller courts making a full-time judge affordable.
The smaller towns only hold court once or twice a month anyway so a schedule could easily be worked out where a judge is at one town court two or three days a week the first week and at another court the remainder of that week or two or three days a week the following week.
In Illinois, only an attorney with a license to practice law is allowed to be a judge it has been that way since the state was formed and is written in the Illinois Constitution.