How To Conduct Your Own Bench Trial

For almost every serious charge, if you cannot afford an attorney, you will be appointed a public defender. However, for minor traffic tickets, or instances when the State is not seeking jail (I've seen it done on first time DUI cases) if you cannot afford an attorney, you're SOL. If you decide that you do not want to take the prosecution's offer, or you want to contest a ticket you have received, your best bet is to go forward with a bench trial. This post is dedicated to tell you the procedure for how to conduct your own bench trial.

A bench trial is when you have a trial just in front of a Judge. You probably will have a right to a jury trial, but if you have never conducted a jury trial before, going forward with a jury trial is not in your best interest. Jury trials are extremely formal, and require you to know a lot of intricacies about the law. Most judges will not give you the benefit of the doubt just because you're not an attorney. Plus, in many counties, a jury trial will require you to come back for multiple court dates.

A bench trial on the other hand is much more informal. A Judge is most likely to grant you the benefit of the doubt. Nobody expects a normal, non-attorney to know the nuances of the law during a bench trial. Plus, most likely, you will only have to show up for one court date- the trial itself.

Going forward with a trial can be a nerve racking experience. But I am here to make it a little easier on you, by explaining how the procedure works. Most lay people have bench trials for speeding tickets and Failure to Reduce Speed to Avoid an Accident tickets. I'll use those two cases as an example.

Why You Should Blind Plea or Open Plea

There are certain procedural matters that people just do not know about. If you ever have to go into Court for your first appearance, you have a certain number of options. The main four are:

- Work out a plea agreement with the prosecutor
- Get a new date to discuss any plea offers or try to hire an attorney
- Set case for trial
- Open Plea or Blind Plea

For minor traffic matters, almost everybody pleas or sets their case for trial. Very rarely do people open plea their case. Mainly, because people don't ever know what an open plea is.

How To Fight Your Speeding Ticket in Illinois

Since speeding tickets were invented, people have always been trying to get out of them. Many people try to fight their speeding ticket in Court and get it thrown out. So how do you go about getting your speeding ticket thrown out? The short answer: "You won't be able to".

However, there are many tips of the trade, and ways to make it better for yourself. Read this post to find out how to make your life easier after you have gotten a speeding ticket. These are the many ways for how you can fight your speeding ticket in Illinois.

First of all, let me give you some background about speeding tickets in general. Speeding is what is called a "strict liability crime." What that means is that your mental state is not important. What you were thinking and whether you meant or intended to speed is irrelevant. All the prosecutor needs to prove is whether you were speeding or not. Everything else is just not important.

When people demanded trials, here are the things I brought up when I was a prosecutor as it related to speeding:

• The officer was on duty
• The officer noticed a car that appeared to be going at a high rate of speed
• The officer used some official tool to determine the person's speed
• Radar
• Lidar
• The officer's own car and speedometer 
• The official tool was in proper working condition
• The posted speed limit in the area
• The person who drove the speeding car is the person who received the ticket
• Any incriminating statements made by the person who received the ticket ("I'm sorry I was speeding" or "I wasn't going 50, I was only going 45!"- even when the speed limit is only 40)

Every single prosecutor will be able to ask these very simple questions, and if it's not the prosecutor's first day on the job, they will ask these questions. Most, if not all of them, can win a speeding ticket trial in their sleep. 

However, there are still many tips of the trade that I have learned throughout the years of things that procedurally you can do:

What Is Court Supervision?

If you are found or plead guilty, depending on the type of crime or offense you committed, the Court could place you on what's called Court Supervision. This is the lowest form of punishment, and this is the best form of "punishment" for a person who committed an offense.

What is Court Supervision is best described as what it's not- a conviction. Court Supervision is *NOT* a conviction. That means if you are ever asked, mainly by your insurance company or on a job application, "Have you ever committed a crime?", the answer is unequivocally "NO".

730 ILCS 5/5-6-3.1 reads like this in part:

(d) The Court shall defer entering any judgment on the charged until the conclusion of the supervision.
(e) At the conclusion of the period of supervision if the court determines that the defendant has successfully complied with all of the conditions of supervision, the court shall discharge the defendant and enter a judgment dismissing the charges.

Many Judges I've worked with sees Court Supervision as a delayed dismissal of a case. I never viewed it that (I will explain why in a bit), but that goes to show you how beneficial Court Supervision is.

There are four main types of punishment: Court Supervision, Conditional Discharge, Probation, and a Conviction. The latter three are considered "convictions" and they will be discussed more in depth in a later post. For right now, we are just concerning ourselves with Court Supervision.