City of Toronto has withdrawn some 880,000 parking tickets in order to meet the requirement that trials be held within a reasonable time. This happened in court on Friday but was announced today (Sunday, September 6, 2015). The court backlog of tickets has led to these stale-dated tickets being suspended in the legal process until they had little or no chance of obtaining a conviction under the charter.
TOO MANY REQUESTS FOR TRIAL
The charter ensures the right to a trial within a reasonable amount of time, historically 12 to 16 months for parking tickets. Withdrawing the tickets ensures compliance with the charter and avoids pursuing tickets that have exceeded the time frame and have no reasonable prospect of conviction. The City says it prioritizes the scheduling of trials in its courtrooms to accommodate more serious charges first although it a would appear that parking ticketS surely fall to the bottom of any such list rather quickly. The high volume of parking ticket trial requests made between 2012 and 2014 greatly exceeded courtroom capacity and availability of justices of the peace to hear the cases.
LIKE AN HOUR OR TWO IN JAIL
It is also evidence that those who say one should never plead guilty to a parking ticket but rather always request a trial are right. That would no doubt be a more popular option if it were not for the required process of standing in line in certain unfortunate City-owned rooms to register such a request. Some people have called this experience a lot like being in jail for an hour or so.
