Subject:               Re: Halifax Co. Traffic Citation         Date:               Wed, 10 Nov 1999 23:29:36 -0500        From:               Conrad Hubbard <conradhubbard@surfree.com>     Reply-To:               email@conradhubbard.com  Organization:               www.ConradHubbard.com          To:               Turner Stephenson <turners@coastalnet.com>, frasere@halifaxnc.com   References:               1 Dear Mr. Turner Stephenson and whomever else's notice is necessary to ensure that this matter is resolved, I have received a copy today of the registered, certified notice for the envelope in which I sent you my Second payment of a Halifax County, North Carolina originated ticket. It is stamp-signatured by one Charlie Hawkins, whom I hope is employed by your county. As this verifies that this time you have received my Money Order, please send the state of Georgia and myself the information necessary to clear up this mess. I included a copy of the legal notice from Georgia that contains the necessary address, though obviously you already had it, since you had informed them of your accusations anyway, and I have already given your people my address and phone number. This time, there is no excuse for them not having proper contact information of every sort I could reasonably provide. Within the context of your letter to me below, Mr. Stephenson, I have answered some of your notes and speculations: Turner Stephenson wrote: > Mr. Hubbard: > >     You were correct in your assertion that someone mishandled your > ticket approximately ten years ago. Thank you for that admission. Why it took such a long time to get anyone to even consider the fact that I was telling the truth is beyond my comprehension of bureaucratic workings, but it is good to hear a Confession by a government employee that their agency did indeed make a mistake. You know, I hear confession is good for the soul. > The Clerk of Court has checked the > old files and found that you attempted to pay the ticket off with a > personal check, contrary to the instructions on the back of the > citation. That was what I asked them to do in the first place, but they would not. Again, thank you for your help. I initially told the lady on the phone that I had paid the ticket, and that I felt I had done so with a check. When she said that there was no way it could have been with a check, I told her that I felt that then perhaps it was a money order, but regardless, I knew that I had paid the ticket. She said that could not be possible, and you similarly hinted that you did not believe that I had tried to pay the ticket. As I do not possess a copy of the citation, I can only take your word that the instructions to pay with a money order or cash were there at all, but I am quite certain that they at very least were not very clearly written if they led me to believe that sending a check was okay. Since I knew I had paid the ticket, it seemed to me that since I must assume your people were truthful to me in their assertion that I could only pay with a money order or cash that I must have done so with a money order. But no one would check, instead seeming more happy to simply assume I was a liar until otherwise informed. > The Clerk's office returned the check to you the next day, Again, I can only take your word for this. However, it is odd that it did not get forwarded to me or that when it was returned that no one tried to discern a valid address. I am not saying that no one might have tried to send it back to me, but that it is odd in the extreme that when your people got it back they didn't even try to contact me, and odd that they had an incorrect address to begin with. > but the address was no longer valid and it was returned to the Clerk's > office, where your check has been held for the past ten years. To what address did they try to return the check? If they threw away the envelope in which the check arrived, and which almost certainly had a return address, and insisted on using the address on the check itself, then perhaps that could explain their mistake, but why would anyone not use the return address on the envelope. That is, after all, what it is designed to do. In most places anyway. Why didn't the lady who accused me so readily on the phone find this information of which you now inform me after over a week's delay when she searched for indication that I had paid? She sure found the accusatory files pretty quickly. > You did > not following the instructions on the citation and apparently did not > check to see that the check never cleared the back. I suppose I assumed that a government agency would not fail to deposit a check, but then I assumed that a government agency was there to serve the people--you know: By the People, of the people, for the people. Oh, that's right, North Carolina tried to secede from that Yankee government that followed that Constitution so they could keep their slaves and all that. But they never make mistakes. And they don't accept United States dollars through federally insured banks either. >     You will be contacted by the Clerk's office by mail concerning this > matter. If you really mean this, then I really do thank you, but I would prefer some way to contact the Clerk's office directly to make sure they are actually acting on this. So far the phone number with which you provided me seems to lead only to people who don't have your access to certain records, but have all too easily obtained access to records that suggest opposite of the true situation. I don't want it to take ten years before they discover their mistakes again. I do not really have time for this to continue in this strange circle wherein it takes this long to even get an acknowledgement that I did try to pay the ticket rather than offensive accusations to the opposite effect. My Georgia license will be cancelled on November 17th due to your County's negligence and happiness to formally contact everybody but me with the fact that they weren't going to accept my check as payment for a fine and therefore were requesting that my license be suspended. I contacted your office on the 2nd of November this time around, I believe. That is 8 days, as of today. At this rate, and I am desperately hoping this will not continue at this anachronistically Dark Ages inspired slow rate, even if your people finally get their act together they will still cost me my license. As I have sent a First Union money order, and received a United States Postal Service notice of its receipt signed for by Charlie Hawkins, I hope that you can hurry this up a bit. North Carolina does take First Union money orders, I hope? In American dollars? And they do recognize the United States Postal Service, I hope? >     In the future, it would serve you better to check your facts before > you accuse others of making a mistake. It Might serve me better to do so, though this experience strongly suggests otherwise, but YOUR agencies WERE my source to "check" my "facts" as you say, and they were uncooperative and treated me with suspicion and suggested that I was a liar and fed me suggestive misinformation. Even you did this by suggesting that I did not in fact try to pay the ticket. I can email you a copy of your letter if you do not remember or if it is in your job description to pretend that you do not remember. My efforts to check the facts were hampered by people telling me that "no, you had to have done this" and "just pay the ticket" and "if you had paid the ticket" and "our records indicate no record of you paying the ticket and if you had done so they would indicate so" and "if  you had paid the ticket we would have your money order copy" and so forth. Since there was a check awaiting me there for ten years, and since your county can so brutally obviously contact agencies in other states, then why couldn't they contact me. My name and address have been publicly displayed in the phone book and in operator information in every single city in which I have lived, including that to which you reputedly tried to return my check. The disappointing fact remains that no one really tried very hard to inform me that I was in jeopardy because someone couldn't deposit my check because of some policy. It was just easier to file some nasty paperwork, suspend a license I had no reasonable way to know was not already ended upon my residency change, and let the system grind me up while some lazy employee went home to eat their black-eyed peas and drunkenly rot their brains in front of the TV. Now I can eat black-eyed peas with the best of them, but the fact remains that I considered the matter closed ten years ago when I paid the ticket. I paid it with a perfectly good check backed up by funds in a federally insured bank of the United States of America. The instructions that such a method would not be good enough for Halifax County, North Carolina were not clear enough that I noticed them, and obviously since I did in fact try to pay my ticket, as per your snidely worded admission, I was not trying to flout any rules or law. If my honest effort to meet the requirements of the penal system had been met with honest efforts to let me know that I had made a mistake, then this would never have happened. But, instead, it is apparently seen as more productive to wring extra fees, blood-money and tragic wastes of time from your current and ex-citizens. > Turner Stephenson What still concerns me, and this is an issue you have only exacerbated with the tone of your newest letter to me, is that I was presumed guilty automatically by you and all of the Halifax County associates with whom I had dealings. This is contrary to the fundamental ideals of the Constitution of the United States of America, whether it is actually illegal or not. The path you and your associates take is flagrantly in violation of the spirit of the Constition, if not the legal implicatons. You seem to still feel that I was guilty of somehow trying to skirt the system, when in fact your own letter admits unequivocably that I made an honest effort to pay my fine. This effort took nine days, not to hopefully mention the preceding TEN YEARS, to even cause someone to look into the Possibility that I might be telling the truth. I am convinced that even this would not have happened at all if I had not afforded myself of the help of friends willing to stand up for my character on my behalf. You, sir, have given me the benefit of knowing for absolute sure that I tried to do the right thing and was still smacked around by the Halifax County legal system and its bureaucratic paper pushing for no good reason. After ten years, I knew I had tried to pay the ticket, but the more lazy and incompetent people of your system kept questioning my integrity and accusing me of being a liar, the more I naturally started to doubt myself. After all, it had been ten years, maybe, just maybe, somehow I didn't remember right. I knew otherwise, but my faith was shaking. The doubt your people created was wrong to try to do to somebody. I tried to do the right thing, and your people didn't care enough to do anything other than intimate that I was a liar who tried to skip out on a ticket. Do you all go to church and pride yourselves on shaking people's faith in other important ideas like concepts of morality and God? It is obvious to me that I may have made a mistake. I apparently missed some provision, likely buried in hard to read legalese written in pale gray on a yellow or offwhite background, on the back of this ticket, that stated that my payment had to be in the form of a money order or cash and that the check of a hardworking American citizen would not be accepted. This does not excuse the continuously repeated mistake, perpetrated by Halifax County, North Carolina, for TEN YEARS, of treating me like a liar and miscreant who refused to pay his ticket. It was your choice again and again not to cash that check you admit getting. It was my mistake to send it apparently, but it was an active, repeatedly made, choice on the part of whatever personnel mishandled it to neither accept the funds, nor to try to contact me like a normal person or business would. Sloth, apathy, incompetence or a combination of the three led your people to choose to let me be screwed by the system. Do you have the envelope? I am just trying to "check" my "facts" here. Do you have the original envelope? Does it have a return address on it? Is it the same as the check? To which address did they try to return the check? Is there any record of an attempt to call information in the City of Richmond, Virginia, to try to inform a Mr. Conrad Hubbard that the County of Halifax planned on treating him like a criminal because they would not take his check when he obviously did not know of this intent? If so, what number did they call? When the ticket was "not paid", did anyone subpoena Mr. Conrad Hubbard to appear in court to defend himself? To what address did they send that subpoena? Or do we now live in a police state where you are not allowed to defend yourself? Did you  not, in fact, inform the State of North Carolina that I had failed to try to pay my ticket? Did you not in your previous email to me even go so far as to lie and say that your county had no power or enforcement over traffic provisions whatsoever? I think I can email you a copy of that letter again if you don't remember your falsehoods or if you would like me to show others what you are willing to say in pursuit of whatever you perceive your job to be. I remind you and however many others I need to remind, that my license to drive a motor vehicle in the state of Georgia still remains under threat due to the actions and willful inactions of your Halifax County government. I hope you will do the right thing and manage to remove this troublesome, slanderous mark from my record and properly inform every authority whom you have intentionally set into motion against my person and freedom that I have done my duty and paid my 30 pieces of silver. I suspect that Christ himself would be sorry he bothered to pass through your county, as your people would probably charge him with making liquor or practicing medicine without a license or some such and keep a bizarre doggedly followed, yet grossly inaccurate record of this reputed charge until the Revelations came to pass. Thank you, and may the principles of our founding forefathers become your principles like they should already be, and may your conscience be Resurrected -- Conrad Hubbard Copyright © Conrad Hubbard  Back to The Traffic Citation of Christ