Once a New York City parking ticket goes into “judgment”, it becomes very diffcult to un-do the judgment and interest starts to accrue. So when does an NYC parking ticket go into judgment?
If you fight a New York City parking ticket and lose, you have 30 days to appeal. If you fail to answer it and a fine is imposed by default, you have 30 days to pay it. A judgment is entered against the recipient of the parking ticket shortly after the expiration of either one of these 30-day periods. Absent a reasonable excuse for the default and meritorious defense to the offense, it is at this point that you have only two options: pay the full amount or ignore it.
Note that the “hearing complete” designation on the Department of Finance web site does not include the date the judge makes a finding of guilt. So while the 30 days begins to run from the date of decision, you can’t tell when it was rendered and you should act quickly if you want to try and reduce the fine amount.
For cases in judgment, New York City parking ticket expert, Lawrence Berezin, of www.newyorkparkingticket.com has an excellent post on how to try and vacate a default judgment.
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In regards to judgments, I have the following question. NY VTL §1806-A (4) requires that a traffic and parking violations agency notify the defendant by certified mail prior to entering a default judgement. This seems to be mirror language of subsection (1) except that sub (1) applies only to courts and exempts application to cities with a population of 1 million or more (i.e., NYC).
Now, the NYC Administrative code § 19-207 has almost identical language, but it requires notice only by ordinary mail, not certified. However, the closest I see the VTL coming to allowing this change is in § 1642 (20), and even at that it would seem a stretch.
So my question to you is, do you know if this issue has come up in the NYC parking hearings, and if so, how was it resolved? In the alternative, if you could point me to a good resource for researching this, I’d be happy to do the leg work, it’s just that this area of law doesn’t seem all that well documented or commented upon.
PS- I have access to westlaw and lexis as a 1st year law student, but my skill with using them is still a work in progress.
PPS- Assembly bill A1344-2011 would amend the VTL to allow for notice of default by First Class mail instead of certified mail, but it is still in committee.
Jeremy,
Get the McKinney’s VTL and look up the annotations for Section 1806-A. Let me know if you need any help and feel free to share your research results.
Matthew Weiss