Ruling Allows O.C. to Pursue Old Traffic Cases

An appellate court ruling paves the way for Orange County to reissue arrest warrants for more than 100,000 traffic offenders who have failed to show up for court since 1989, court officials said Wednesday.

The ruling, which reverses an earlier judgment by the county’s Superior Court, will allow the county to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Now we have a chance to collect all those fines,” said Orange County Municipal Judge Ronald P. Kreber in Laguna Niguel.

But attorneys who opposed the court’s decision contended that the three-justice panel on the 4th District Court of Appeal based its judgment on practical concerns, not the law.

“If they had followed what I believe the law to be, it would have shut down the system,” said attorney Mark Sutherland. “They have an interest in trying to keep the system in place, and it would have been very expensive to change it.”

The appellate court Tuesday ruled on the question of whether Municipal Court clerks, rather than prosecutors, could file failure-to-appear complaints, as allowed by a 1989 state law.

The case was brought by Kurt Albert Stapf, a Laguna Niguel resident who had paid nearly $2,000 in fines for failing to appear five times in court and for motorcycle speeding tickets.

Stapf contends that the state law allowing clerks to issue complaints for failure to appear is unconstitutional because it gives powers to court clerks that are reserved for prosecutors.

The law was designed by the state Legislature to create a cost-effective method of issuing arrest warrants. Kreber said that foisting the task on the already overworked district attorney’s office would have caused failure-to-appear cases to be neglected.

“I’m afraid they wouldn’t get filed at all,” he said.

But on July 8, the appellate division of the Orange County Superior Court sided with Stapf, contending that the lower court’s procedure for issuing warrants was unconstitutional because it violated a state provision for separation of government powers. The county’s district attorney’s office also sided with Stapf.

After the July ruling, law enforcement officials in Orange County began suspending as many as 175,000 arrest warrants.

Tuesday’s appellate ruling in favor of Orange County’s municipal courts was being watched closely by other counties, including Los Angeles and Butte, that follow the same practice, Kreber said.

A ruling halting the practice could have led to lawsuits forcing counties statewide to suspend warrants issued by municipal court clerks and jeopardized millions of dollars in fines, said Deputy County Counsel Tom Agin, who represented the municipal courts in the appeal.

Some 974,000 failure-to-appear warrants involving traffic violations are filed each year in the state. Defendants usually are offered a choice of jail time or fines that typically run from $225 and up, Kreber has said.

In their finding, appellate justices said their ruling differed from the Superior Court’s decision in part because of the difference in the legal question that was asked. The Superior Court had been asked whether a “court” could institute a criminal action, but the state appellate court was asked whether a “court clerk” could do so.

The state appellate court ruled that a court clerk is legally distinct from a court. Therefore, allowing a court clerk to perform an executive duty such as issuing a warrant does not violate a separation between government executive and judicial powers, the court ruled.

Moreover, requiring thousands of automatic violations to be referred to the district attorney’s office would “exalt dry formalism. . . . The system cannot afford such niceties,” wrote Justice Thomas Crosby in his opinion for the court. He was joined in the opinion by justices David Sills and Edward Wallin.

Besides allowing Orange County to go forward with collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, the ruling tells scofflaws who break promises to appear in court that the behavior won’t be tolerated, said County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider.

“It sends a message to them that they’d better show up,” Schneider said. “This is the kind of thing the public has a real problem with.”

Defense attorneys for Stapf said they are considering asking the appellate court to rehear the case. If the court rules against Stapf again, they are likely to appeal the case to the California Supreme Court.

“This is a situation in which we have nothing to lose,” Sutherland said. “We got slammed down on all points.”