Double jeopardy

The unreasonably high price of parking-ticket justice

Cityscape by Sarah McNaught

Bill Murphy got a parking ticket for violating a street-cleaning ordinance, but the 49-year-old amateur actor questioned whether he deserved it. He says he isn't sure he was parked on the wrong side of Sammett Street in Everett.

"You're allowed to park on one side while the other side is being cleaned, and the ticket doesn't say I was actually on the wrong side," says the Everett resident. "So I appealed it to the parking clerk."

Murphy lost the appeal, but the clerk told him he could take his case one step further. In Massachusetts, you can appeal a parking ticket to the parking clerk's office in the city where you were ticketed. If you're dissatisfied with the clerk's decision, you can then appeal to the civil division of Superior Court. But whether the court finds in your favor or not, you'll lose.

That's because whether they're appealing a $10 ticket for blocking a loading zone or a $75 ticket for parking in a handicapped spot, insistent drivers must fork over a $185 filing fee to make their cases before a judge. Win or lose, the fee is nonrefundable.

As a result, says Boston Transportation Department spokesperson Jim Mansfield, "what ends up happening is that people pay the ticket whether they think they're right or not, because appealing to Superior Court is not a viable option."

Murphy, for one, decided once he found out about the filing fee that he would probably not bother with an appeal. So did Tricia Osborne, a 19-year-old environmental assistant at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, who says she believes she was wrongly ticketed two months ago.

Osborne says that when she took her two-year-old son, Tyler, and her 11-month-old daughter, Angela, to see the ducks in the Public Garden, she parked in a metered spot on Beacon Street that turned into resident-permit parking after 6 p.m. "We fed the swans and had a picnic on the grass near the Make Way for Ducklings statues, and it was a really nice day," Osborne remembers. "Knowing that it takes my son forever to get his toys and things together, I began packing up our things around 5:30 so I could move my car before I got a ticket."

Osborne says she reached her car at 5:55 p.m., only to find a $20 ticket on her windshield for parking in a resident-permit-only zone. The meter maid had written the time on the ticket as 6:07 p.m. Osborne appealed to the parking clerk, but the ticket was not overturned.

"I didn't agree with the decision the parking clerk made because I didn't think she was being fair. After all, she does work for the same department that gave me a ticket in the first place," says Osborne. But when she tried to take her complaint to Superior Court, she quickly got discouraged. "I sure as hell wasn't going to grease the palms of the court just to get the violation taken off my record," she says.

Marie Zollo, coordinator of civil courts for the state Superior Court Department's administrative office, explains that because parking appeals are not kept separate from other Superior Court appeals, it's impossible to gauge how many people actually pursue their appeals all the way to Superior Court. "To be honest, it is not even a process I am familiar with," says Zollo, who has more than 30 years' experience in the civil courts.

When drivers arrive to appeal their tickets and find out about the filing charge, the response is always the same, says Whitney Brown, first assistant clerk in Middlesex Superior Court.

"Oh, people don't know about the fee when they show up here, but when they're told, they lose it," says Brown, who admits that $185 is excessive. "Everyone yells and screams. But I always tell them not to shoot the messenger."

Disputing parking violations hasn't always been such an absurd process. Up until the mid-'60s, all parking-violation hearings were heard in Superior Court, and there was no charge. But things got so bogged down, says Mansfield, that some cases were pending for well over a year, and others were never called at all. To alleviate the burden on the court system, the City of Boston filed legislation calling for a parking clerk magistrate to be appointed to the Transportation Department. The sole job of the Office of the Parking Clerk would be to hear the hundreds of parking-ticket appeals that were filed each month. Drivers would still be allowed to take their disputes to Superior Court -- but the court would charge the fee that applied to all other Superior Court appeals.

Those fees, which already exceeded the cost of many parking tickets, were doubled by then-governor Michael Dukakis in 1988. And because the charge is written into the law, it's essentially non-negotiable. Art Kingsman, a litigator for the American Automobile Association, says he receives many complaints about the "absurdly excessive" fees.

"On the surface, the appeals process appears to be in place on behalf of the driver," says Kingsman. "But in fact, it's an additional punishment above and beyond the original ticket."

Sarah McNaught can be reached at smcnaught@phx.com.