Appealing to the court of common pleas
by Maddog on May.31, 2009, under Court
In an earlier article I wrote about how I was charged with failure to file a local earned income tax return.
After the local District Magistrate found me guilty with no evidence I appealed to the Dauphin County Court of common pleas.
Appealing a summery offense to the Court of common pleas is a simple filing of some paperwork and paying the filing fee. The paper work is filed at the clerk of courts. You need the name of the complaining party as listed on the criminal complaint, the name of the District Magistrate and an address to send them a copy of the notice of appeal. You also need all the basic info on the case: charge, verdict, date & time of the hearing. Also make sure you ask for extra stamped copies of everything you file.
After filing the paperwork I go back to my office and start writing the pretrial motion.
I wrote a simple motion to dismiss. All I did was cite the prosecution’s violation of the rules of criminal procedure, including the statute of limitations found in Title 42 P. S. section 5552.
I have to make enough copies of the motion so serve all the parties involved in the case. This included the Dauphin County District Attorney, the person who filed the complaint, the clerk of courts, the court administrator, and I should have served the tax bureau, however luckily the Judge overruled the prosecutor’s objection.
The prosecutor wrote a response to my motion. In it they tried to argue that there is no statue of limitations.
When I hearing began the prosecutor asked the Judge to increase the fine to the maximum level. I suppose the main reason they did that was to intimidate anyone who was waiting in the courtroom to fight whatever charges they were facing. Also known as “making an example”. Now after my earlier experience at the District Magistrate, I didn’t know what to expect and was prepared to go to the supreme court the Judge ruled against me.
After the prosecutor’s opening statement the Judge turned to me and asked me what my argument was. I figured he already read the motion, however I was happy to state my argument about the statue of limitations in open court.
What happened next was really cool. The prosecutor started to say that there was no statue of limitations for that crime. As I was standing there waiting for my turn to rebut the prosecutor’s argument the Judge interrupted the prosecutor and said almost exactly what I was going to say. The whole thing lasted less than ten mins.
The best part was hearing the Judge tell the prosecutor that I was “outside the jurisdiction of this court”.
Now I never thought I’d hear a Judge tell a prosecutor that a defendant was outside the jurisdiction of a court, and hearing it about me in open court was orgasmic.
I won that case. I thought since the tax bureau had lost that it was over. A year later they charged me again.
I’ll tell you how that went in a future article. The hearing in the Court of common pleas in that one lasted about two hours.
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