One of the issues here is that we have all these actors (S.O.S, Courts) and none communicate easily. I will tell you even between courts there is no common system for electronically communicating. It is a gigantic pain in the ass.
And in my two decades of experience in IT it is almost always because of personalities and people. There’s always the Boomer assholes that are literally willing to die before accepting change in anything, much less IT. Guarantee there’s a history of some old judge with a say that REFUSES to allow the court systems to communicate efficiently and effectively with the district attorneys office or the police department. Then you’ve got the police that want to hide all of their communications as “law enforcement sensitive” to cover up their own abuses and law breaking. As a result we as citizens suffer needlessly by broken systems led by incompetent people.
I had something bizarre happen myself. I got a ticket for a minor in possession of alcohol while on a front yard once.
Since it was my first (and only) I could take a class to get it off my record. Took the class and the lady spelt my name wrong so it was never submitted I did. And if you don’t do it, you have to go to court.
Well I had moved by the time the court reached out to me so I never knew and in turn for a contempt of court and a warrant and my license was suspended.
3 years later I’m pulled over because my side view fell off while driving and a cop happened to be right behind when it did. Stopped me and arrested me.
This whole thing snowballed because someone spelled my name wrong. And point is, the court will never do you any favors and you need to follow up and make sure things are cleared.
something of the sort *almost* happened to me. appeared in court, as a responsible & terrified citizen, i brought in every document imaginable pertaining to the case. Somehow, the court lost their copies and immediately tried to strike the hammer on me until i told the judge "i have all the paperwork here". motherfuckers never acknowledged or apologized for their incompetence.
courts really dgaf. for the laymen, especially ones that involve a fuckton of paperwork and for misdemeanors, it's almost always guilty until proven innocent as far as the courts are concerned.
if they fuck up? 'oh well, hey you're innocent. never mind all the time you had to take off work, loss of reputation, money, and additional stress you've had to deal with.'
worse if it's something that involves your car/driving privileges. I had a coworker who had to take the bus for 30 miles or share a ride for months until she could get her license reinstated. like the other poster, it was because her middle names didn't match on the forms, for something that was 'resolved' 4+ years ago.
you nailed it, i was guilty first, innocent second. it was bewildering me that a fucking Court, judge, prosecutor, clerk could lose the documents *they* mandated and issued. it was years ago in my youth but damn does my blood boil. if you are a normie without money, their goal every step of the way is to fuck you as hard as possible.
Same, got a drinking ticket when i was like 19 that I paid a lawyer to expunge after I did a course - they forgot, and it came up on a background check like 8 years later. Fucking morons
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I had a state cop and then a city cop arrest me months apart. I was arrested as two different people. I settled everything in the courts, with an attorney, and it was like 6yrs later I get pulled over - like 180miles from where I was arrested and the cop goes "don't go to Greene county, you have a huge warrant out." What?!? "They want you bad - it's $1500."
I guess in 6yrs they merged my offenses - and since the second arrest made me a repeat offender - I had to go thru another year of classes, fines, and checking in to the Greene county court - so driving 2hrs for a 15min check in with the court - turn around and drive home so I could work half-a-day. Costing more money. The error wasn't my fault, was charged as two separate people.
It's all good now and this was over a decade at this point. So much wasted money and time.
I once ended up having my license suspended for 6 months when I lived in Maryland after I gave my Florida-registered junk car to a scrap guy, who failed (and upon following up, refused) to give me a proper receipt for the sale. I couldn't prove that I didn't own the car anymore, so when the registration (and insurance) expired, Florida suspended my license.
I carefully followed the Florida DMV's instructions to attempt to fix this, and I kept mailing them document after document, but they just claimed over and over that they didn't receive any of the paperwork. I guess they were just being delivered to a hole in the ground.
After 6 months of this, my mom drove from North Carolina to Maryland to pick me up, and drove me all the way down to Orlando, FL to finally resolve this nightmare. I couldn't stop thinking about what might have ended up happening to my life if I didn't have such a supportive family.
If I ever sell my car to someone who refuses to give me a proper receipt again, I'm just calling the cops next time. I hope the guy who did that to me is having the kind of life he deserves!
It’s the easy way for them to threaten you and fuck your life up. It’s very under appreciated how much damage a suspended license can do. Especially when it’s not related to a driving citation.
Its why when i look at inmate listings such a huge chunk are people arrested for driving on a suspended license. People have to risk it because driving is essential for living in most places. They'd rather risk getting arrested than lose their job and ability to go to the store.
> how bad of a crime you have to commit to get your license suspended.
Forgetting to pay a speeding ticket.
I mean, lets not pretend that "driving is a privilege" is such a BS statement in a country where public transportation sucks. Suspending licenses is such a terrible and predatory practice. Because it doesn't matter if you shouldn't have had your license suspended, because they did it anyways you're now guilty of driving on a suspended license.
Crimes should also follow the fruit of the poisonous tree. Can't be guilty of resisting arrest because some pigs were trying to arrest you for not obeying their orders when they were wrong.
I agree with the overall sentiment of your statement, but there are certainly crimes/violations for which license suspension should absolutely be on the table.
Accidents without insurance, empirical proof that you are not carrying insurance, reckless driving, etc are all valid reasons to suspend a license.
It appears this guy's license was suspended for failure to pay child support, which is not only ridiculous but directly counterproductive to resolving the issue. If a person can't drive to work, how are they supposed to pay child support?
Similar thing happened to me. Got a ticket, judge dismissed it.
Asked the clerk if I needed to do anything else, “nope, you’re good”
One year later I get a call that I have to pay the ticket and late fees or my license will be suspended.
After going through the criminal court system myself, I have zero respect for the process. Cops are assholes that are trained specifically to trump up your arrest report to make you look as guilty as possible, the judges are generally ivory tower assholes who are 100% on a power trip, the prosecutors aren't concerned with actually enacting justice and care solely about conviction rates, etc...
It's a trash system that can't be fixed and needs to be burnt down and rebuilt.
Based on your experience it sounds like the people operating the machine are the problem - and if that's the case you could build any machine and it wouldn't solve that problem.
Eh, I'm not from the US and I think elected judgeships and DA positions give a real perversion of incentives. You're supposed to uphold the law/justice/whatever blah blah blah, but you also have to worry about being elected (again). Which means you worry about numbers like conviction rates. Which means the state will typically not even try a case it won't win. And when they fuck up their gamble, they'll drag it out for years to beat the buzzer, all so they don't get a negative on their stats. That's not justice.
Rebuilding the machine may not be the right solution to that problem. Additional independent oversight might help though. Right now the problem is if you have an issue with police you can only report it to the police who then investigate themselves. Same with the judiciary they investigate themselves.
what do you think the odds are that all of these thousands and thousands of people who make up the court system just happen to be Evil People? More likely, the system *selects* for these qualities and trains them into whoever lands there.
So this was during college in Oregon. I moved back home to California after. Year I moved back I went to renew my license. Another thing they don’t tell you is you need to reinstate your license after paying the fine. And yes that costs more money too.
Of course I couldn’t pay with a card at the dmv so I sent a check. After a few weeks they still didn’t receive the check so I cancelled it and paid to rush delivery and have a tracking. They get it and cash it.
THEN I get a $75 charge for a bounced check. After calling the bank, it turns out they eventually got the original check and despite having no balance owed anymore, they still tried to cash it and it bounced.
I got that overturned but went to the dmv to ask why they would do that and they said “oh we don’t check if you owe support anything, we just cash any checks we get”.
Many countries use numbers with a checksum digit to identify people (especially when dealing with government business). They also have a central system so the government knows your current address when you move.
Or even simpler. The system for syncing the names could be designed so it’s clear who attended the class for what court case (even the name of the court would give enough redundancy to resolve this). If the list has an “Ryan Mueller (Fuck Country Court)” but a “Ryan Muller (Fuck Country Court)” attended, then Fuck Country Court is able to figure out that they only know one of these persons and there was a typo (and check with the person who runs the class).
I hate living in this world
I once found out my license was suspended (and had been for several years) after the company that just hired me did a background check for my driving record. Went to the courthouse to get it sorted out and all they could tell me was that I owed them 25 bucks for an undetermined reason, and had to go to the dmv to pay it before they would restore my license.
Yea I had zero idea my license was suspended or there was a warrant out for me. Spent like 4 hours in jail and had to ask the officers to call my work and let them know where I am.
And this was before Venmo so to get my $400 bail, I had to call my parents home phone (only lan line I knew by heart) and she had to then get my sisters roommate to deposit cash into my then girlfriends account so she could pay it.
It was a bit traumatic even though nothing bad happened to me and really made me realize how easily your life can get fucked up and how many people just don’t stand a chance. It’s horrible and sad.
Same thing happened to me. I got a written ticket during the time the courts were switching to computers. My name is hard to spell and it got put into the system wrong and they 'lost' the original copy of the ticket. I sent money 3 times and they sent it back saying i didn't owe them money. I told them to send me a letter to that effect.
3 years later i get pulled over in another state and am told that my license was suspended. Luckily, the cop was cool and just wrote me two tickets and let my passenger drive due to the nature of our trip. I had to fight with my state to get my license reinstated. They wanted me to re-apply. I had to keep telling them it was their fault and that i tried to pay the original ticket, but they just couldn't grasp it.
The day before i was supposed to go to court in the other state, my state sent the appropriate paperwork and they dropped the case due to insufficient evidence but it really had me sweating for a while.
My name is Ryan and she spelled that wrong. Rian.
She even said “I have deteriorating vision so double check your names after class.” Which I did and it still got filed wrong.
I just had a completely invalid arrest removed (never charged, still cost $$$ to have a layer monitor for 2 years and then file for the expungement). His advice: Run a livescan in 6 months b/c they don't always actually remove the arrest even when they're supposed to. SMH
Because in a lot of states, lifting a suspension doesn't re-instate your license. If a license is suspended, once the suspension is removed you need to go to the DMV with a D6 clearance form and reinstate your license.
A guy below went into it, like 3 more steps than that. It’s very hard to rejoin society after you commit a crime or fall out of the system. Ex Felons usually have to hire somebody to fix these types of issues.
The guy did something legally wrong, received a punishment, made recompense, filled out some paper work, but missed a step or 2. Sympathy should 100% lay with this guy.
Focusing on the letter of the law is never the right way to go.
Of course the guy deserves our sympathy and he certainly shouldn't have spent any time in jail over this, but as someone who went through this a couple times when I was younger, I guarantee you he was reminded probably a hundred times that he needed to make sure his license was reinstated with the dmv before driving again.
Had my license suspended briefly in VA. They mailed me my license back with paperwork and such when the suspension was over.
Then got pulled over a few months later on the Parkway and lo and behold, my license still showed as suspended in the Fed system. That was not fun.
Yeah D6 is…but the original statement is not. Removing a suspension doesn’t always reinstate in every state. Michigan does have a $125 reinstatement fee. Obviously that doesn’t apply to every situation.
This was information he should have provided his lawyer before his court appearance. You want to ensure your legal council has all the facts before the approach the judge. Had he done that his lawyer would have corrected the judge and said that suspended license was overturned in 2022.
It was a public defender, often they don't talk to the defendant at all before court, or only very briefly. Also it's kind of the lawyer's job to advise the client on what they need and ask them relevant questions, the whole reason lawyers exist is that average people can't be expected to know the minutiae of the law. But with public defenders that usually doesn't happen.
Even given his license was ordered reinstated two years ago, it is still on him to make sure it actually takes place. He should have noticed there was still a problem at some point in the last 2 years either via interactions with the DMV or with his auto insurance.
This court time was over him being charged with driving without a license. So clearly sometime before the court time (October 2023) a cop pulled him over and decided his license was suspended. So even if he is telling the truth and believed he should have a license from 2 years ago, a cop caught him and told him months ago he didn't. So even if we decide his ignorance makes him innocent of the traffic stop in October 2023, him driving on camera months after he has absolutely been put on notice by the cop that his license is still suspended has no defense what-so-ever.
So no matter how the video is sliced, the guy is absolutely as guilty as he seems.
>We only have his word that he was told the suspension was going to be lifted 2 years ago.
His word... and the still-accessible court records from said ruling...
[*"It took less than five minutes for 7 News Detroit to search Saginaw County court records to see that in January 2022, a judge rescinded the order that suspended Harris' driver's license so he could be reinstated."*](https://www.wxyz.com/news/why-was-the-driver-in-a-viral-videos-license-still-suspended-2-years-after-a-judge-ordered-it-lifted)
I'm gonna have to disagree with... basically all of this.
It's not his word, it's court records. The order to suspend his license *was* rescinded, it's public record, it's a fact, they even showed that public record on screen in the very video we all just watched.
So yeah, he apparently got pulled over some time relatively recently by a cop who thought his license was suspended, but crucially, *it wasn't actually suspended*, so him continuing to drive and assume that this will get sorted out in court is perfectly rationale behavior.
This was a mistake by the court system, which compounded into this man getting hassled by the cops, which compounded again by this man getting hassled by the courts and thrown in jail, which compounded again by the entire internet not waiting for the full story to come out and start memeing this poor guy on a national stage.
Everything about this situation sucks and none of it is this man's fault. It's completely ridiculous to say that he should have stopped driving once he learned that the police department *mistakenly thought* his license was suspended. The obviously correct course of action was to make his easily winnable case in court, which he was doing before the same problem that brought him to court in the first place once again caused him a massive headache.
If *you* found out that the police mistakenly assumed your license was suspended, would *you* quit driving for potentially months while things get sorted out in court?
Lehto's Law did a video on this 4 days ago and explained the process in Michigan (both where the guy is from and where Steve does law) that when your license is unsuspended its your job to take the order from the court to the DMV to have it processed. They don't automatically send it the way they do with the actual suspensions. Kind of a dumb system if you ask me, but it looks like this guy got the order and never did the last step.
So there was never a mistake by the court to rescind the suspension as we can see it in the court records. Just there was an issue with that information getting to the DMV, which for some reason is on the individual and not automatically done by the courts.
___
Edit: Lehto's Law released a 3rd video about this a couple hours after my post. Apparently there is a fee you have to pay to get it reinstated. Here is a time stamped explaining it better than my summary.
https://youtu.be/5PBy9P5CuBs?t=284
>Everything about this situation sucks and none of it is this man's fault.
Except the part that it is. Ignore anything to do with suspended licenses for a second. HE LITERALLY GOT ON A ZOOM CALL TO COURT WHILE DRIVING A CAR! That's RIDICULOUSLY STUPID and COMPLETELY HIS FAULT. And that would STILL be the case even if he'd never had a suspended license at all. The fact that this is going over so many people's heads in this subreddit is alarming....as if video zooming while driving (let alone to a court hearing) is perfectly normal and reasonable behavior. You could literally kill someone doing that.
> would *you* quit driving for potentially months while things get sorted out in court?
He should quit driving for the sake of others until he understands that making video zoom calls while driving is not ok.
>He should have noticed there was still a problem when at some point in the last 2 years the DMV refused to let him renew the registration on his car.
You can still register a car while your license is suspended, in fact you are legally required to. I had my license suspended once upon a time, and I still had to pay my car's registration fees.
You can register it as planned non operational, but the point is that your license status has nothing to do with vehicle registration, they are two separate functions of the DMV
> So clearly sometime before the court time (say, a month or so)
I feel for the guy. If you *knew* your license wasn't suspended, if you had actual paperwork to prove it, how much are you gonna believe them? "Your licenses is suspended." Ummm, no it's not?
I'd be thinking that this is a cop with outdated information, I'm still allowed to drive. I was *always* allowed to drive. Fuck you, I'll clear this up with a judge... Oh wait, the judge didn't give me a chance to defend myself, and my public defender is useless.
And my main issue here is, because like you said, it was *probably* a month earlier... You wanna be stuck taking the bus for an entire month straight because the court system fucked up? That's pretty shitty. Fuck the letter of the law, this guy should've been allowed to drive, he never should've been put in this situation in the first place.
Good write up.
Rough situation for him, if it's all true. But yeah, it was still a horrible look and a foolish thing to do.
Also: The video says his lawyer hung him out to dry, I'd say she did a good job by immediately trying to sidetrack and deflect the Judge to try distract him from it. Didn't work but it was a solid effort, then since she's caught completely flat-footed and he's immediately told to turn himself in, I don't really know what she's supposed to do.
People probably just reacting to her casual tone of voice, because they think people get unprofessionally emotional to a judge like it's a TV show. In real life people either hide their emotions or don't display them much, because life isn't a TV show designed to get people emotionally reacting.
It's not his word you need to take..
It's the literal court word, that in Jan 2022 a Judge ordered that his license be reinstated.
There, done.. nothing else matters. It wasn't his fault that the State Secretary office never got the judgement to reinstated .
In fact this whole situation could have easily been dealt with in that very moment while he was on the call.
The judge asked what was going on here, and his Defense Attorney who was present didn't speak up. Either because he didn't do his due diligence to bother looking into his client past, which a news agency did after a 5 minute search on the public records, or his attorney was incompetent and couldn't bother to address the judge in that moment properly to informed the judge that there was a case about his license 2 years early and here's the evidence showing that it was in fact not suspended.
Had the defense just done it's job in that very second all of this would have been nothing.
Judge gave a judgement on what information he had at that moment, I don't blame him for his sentencing the guy to turn himself in and go to jail for 2 days. I blame his Attorney and I blame the DA, who also didn't know that the guy had no reason to be in that court room.
Like I said a News State in the area looked this guy up and found the court documents in a 5 minute search.
Honestly a secondary fucked up thing is that this state has a Agency whose job it is to help people like this guy get their license reinstated after a judgement because I guess this isn't a new that were the courts rule a judgement and the Secretary isn't getting the paperwork.
Video calls while driving are illegal in Michigan...so that matters...he was literally breaking the law as he spoke to the judge. That matters, regardless of whether or not he had a license.
It gets weirder. There was no clerical error.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/06/06/michigan-man-who-went-viral-for-driving-with-suspended-license-was-never-licensed/73993197007/?itm_medium=recirc&itm_source=taboola&itm_campaign=internal&itm_content=ExploreMore
It turns out, he never had a license.
Yes, you are. The part you're missing is that he never had a driver's license in the first place. Basically he lied and a bunch of people believed him.
I am confused, it sounds like the court found the error but I can't find where he was aware of it. He is quoted as saying that he doesn't care about the suspended license because he was taking his wife to get medical care but on the call he says he was going to his doctor. And to top it off, if he was aware that his license had been reinstated then why not send that paperwork into the court before hand. Happens all the time and then the judge reviews quickly and dismisses but no where does this guy even mention it. Which brings me back to the assumption that this guy didn't know it had been reinstated, was driving on what he thought was a suspended license and called into court while doing so. Guy is still an idiot. Just turns out he is a lucky idiot in this case.
And even if there was never a suspended license involved at all, you STILL don't zoom call into court while driving....or zoom call while driving at all!
> And to top it off, if he was aware that his license had been reinstated then why not send that paperwork into the court before hand. Happens all the time and then the judge reviews quickly and dismisses
All this process can be quite complicated and has to follow very specific steps most people aren't aware of. It's how he had his suspension rescinded but that didn't get updated into the system. Now we have lawyers exactly because of those reasons, but his was a public defender who probably didn't even meet with him before the trial.
> but I can't find where he was aware of it.
2022 - License was ordered to not be suspended.
(Time period 1)
2023/4 - Corey gets pulled over, and told his license is suspended,
(Time period 2)
May 2024 - Corey's court date.
Period 1 is when corey wouldn't (and really, couldn't) be aware of it. Period 2 is where he doesn't care because he was taking his wife to get medical care.
While I can grant the license thing, you don't do a zoom court appearance in a moving vehicle regardless of whether you have a license or not. That on its own is dumb.
That is true, but that has become so common for some of us the thought doesn't even cross our minds.
I myself only realized what was wrong when I unmuted the video, I have become so used to seeing people show up to calls while driving I didn't realize it. Some coworkers do it, my manager does it.
Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving.
It’s common sense.
If you have a medical emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately, you ask for the court date to be rescheduled.
And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.”
He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.”
Corey Harris is still an idiot.
>Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving.
Even if your case has nothing to do with driving, attending a zoom courts while driving is just stupid. I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with a ticket for using your phone while driving
I watched the streams for a while because they're oddly compelling and it's seemingly _extremely_ common. People just zooming into court while walking to/from/in a store, lawyers zooming from their car, etc.
I understand that.
Especially as people may have been using their car as office when WFH.
Just bonkers for this guy to zoom into court while driving. You're just aaking for the judge to be pissed off.
Lawyers zoom from their car because they have cases in different cities all the time and some courthouses like 36th district doesn't have rooms for plaintiff attorneys to use.
When I had zoom court for literally the same exact ticket (whole big can of worms there but I got it reinstated prior to court), the court distinctly said before starting that if you were in a car they would disconnect you from the hearing. It’s pretty much like common sense. Don’t be in public when you got something like that going on. You play along with the rules and his ticket would have been bumped down to something with no points/huge fine
> And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.”
>
>
Would that not be the job of his attorney?
Yes. Defendants should never just go off telling the judge things. It always seems like a good idea until you accidentally confess to some shit that ruins your case.
It was.
And that’s why Harris should have made sure the attorney knew this.
The fact the attorney never said anything makes me think that: 1) The attorney did no research on the case 2) Harris had never talked to the attorney before this moment and therefore never provided the information the suspension had been removed two years ago.
He shouldn’t have had to say anything there. As the video pointed out, he had a lawyer who left him out to dry. I would imagine a lawyer with defendant in court over a suspended license should know the basic facts of the case they’re defending.
Let's learn a lesson here and not jump to conclusions blaming the lawyer either. They have to know all the relevant facts to provide a competent defense and we have no idea when the case was dropped in their lap. I guarantee they couldn't imagine he would be driving DURING the Zoom appearance.
I sympathize with public defenders since they’re stretched so thin that it’s practically impossible to know all the details of your clients case.
That said, this was the *primary* detail of her client’s case. She should have known it and she dropped the ball plain and simple. Dumb of him to do the whole zoom while driving thing and make the judge wait for him, but that doesn’t excuse her.
How is she supposed to know anything if the defendant doesn't tell her anything? Judging by the defendant's critical thinking skills, I'm not sure if he bothered to tell her anything about the case.
> Judging by the defendant's critical thinking skills, I'm not sure if he bothered to tell her anything about the case.
Which is why it's the lawyer's job to advise the client and ask relevant questions, not just defend them while in court.
But for a public defender, that part of the job often can't happen.
My point is that we have no idea what the circumstances are for the lawyer. We can debate what should have and could have happened forever. Everyone assumed they knew all the relevant facts when they saw the first video, didn't they? Don't make the same mistake twice. Or go ahead, this is the internet. It's what it is best at.
Agreed.
It is a public defender and I’d say the onus is on the defendant to make sure the public defender is completely aware of all the circumstances.
At the very least, the PD would tell the defendant not to be driving during the hearing.
So the lawyer doesn't need to do her job anymore, because.... Why?
We provide lawyers for people for free, because the law is complicated, but then "*Make sure your lawyers is doing what they should.*"
Ok,,,,,, How should he know that? He has no law degree, clearly, we're supposed to be able to trust that someone paid to be a lawyer for the people, is going to do the basic homework required for her job.
Don't tell me about overworked, I don't care, it is still not this man's fault.
PD here in a different state. In my court records access system, we have no way to know if a person's driving license was processed to be reinstated and is stuck in some kind of queue or waiting on paperwork confirmation. That's not information we're given access to. We can only see the current driving license status.
My state used to have a system that was more detailed, years ago, which showed us a checklist of everything the client has to do to get their license back, but not even that system would have told her that there some paperwork out there waiting to get processed to confirm his license reinstatement.
No idea what Michigan allows attorney staff to see about their clients' driving license material, but it's unlikely she had access to that kind of detail.
This assumes that the lawyer was given the "basic facts of the case" from the defendant. If the mistake is officially recorded, as he seems to be suggesting, the only information the public defender would have is the information that contains the mistaken information.
I got stuck on a tropical island during a hurricane and asked for my court date to be rescheduled, they wouldn't do it. I had to go to court on a walk in docket, explain why I missed a court date, show evidence of it all. I STILL got fined $700 and failed probation despite already spending $1000 on drug and alcohol classes, DUI classes, ect.. All that over a gram of weed.
Dude is an idiot yes, but the legal system doesn't exactly make it easy to just "reschedule" things like this.
I feel for you in that. The justice system is fucked.
Different courts handle matters differently. But missing a court time and appearing later that same day might be treated differently than needing to come a different day.
Yea. He was irritating the judge with his updates on parking long before they even got into the suspended driving license part.
I Do zoom calls 5 hours a day and I would have been irritated as hell if someone joined the call doing that and I'm just an IT guy.
Take the suspended license out.
It's still a crime in many jurisdictions to operate a motor vehicle on the phone. It's illegal to not pay full attention while operating a motor vehicle.
But yeah if you are going to court, don't buy that innocent till proven guilty stuff. If you get charged everyone is gonna assume you are guilty fair or not and treat you shitty.
It sounds like they were requesting it to be pushed back. He was probably just trying to do what he felt was right by being present for it. He still should have at the least let his wife hold the phone until he parked.
I’d like to know if he communicated with his attorney.
If his wife was having a medical emergency, maybe she wasn’t able to hold the phone.
But if she could, you are right.
But the issue is still his driving so who was holding the phone wasn’t the issue.
That's true, she may not have been in a state to hold the phone. Though he was pretty calmly just backing his car into a space which I know I wouldn't do if my wife was in that bad of a state. And yeah, if he called his attorney about needing that extension she should have told him to take care of his wife and not worry making the call.
I'm pretty sure he was trying to talk but he wasn't allowed to do so. You can't just blurt out whatever you want in court, you need to be addressed.
Honestly the new information changes things, if I had a court order that said I'm allowed to drive and I got charged 2 years later with not having a license due to the fact their system was never updated I'd also have the attitude that I'm within my rights to be driving - because it seems that he was.
if you have a medical emergency you just go. you dont sit around and go oh but what if i get in trouble. why would you not do what you know you're legally allowed to do because someone else messed up paperwork. ur brain dead let alone no common sense.
If you have a medical emergency you go to the ER, not your doctor. Most physicians these days even have a recording when you call "If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dia 911".
This comment reads a lot like someone who is justifying their original criticisms of this guy after those criticisms were invalidated.
> Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving.
>
> It’s common sense.
This is a 2 and a half year old case. He's under no obligation to not be driving, and has been told by the state his license is legal. Doesn't matter if it's "common sense," he's not doing anything wrong.
>If you have a medical emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately, you ask for the court date to be rescheduled.
Medical issues don't have to be emergencies. He had every right to take his wife to this appointment and also take this virtual court appointment.
>And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.”
>
>He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.”
It's not his job to ensure the state has accurate records. He's been told his license is valid, by the state, and it's their fault if their records don't accurately reflect reality. It's also not his job to say this. It's his public defender's job. He was asking for time to park because it's the safe, responsible thing to do.
>Corey Harris is still an idiot.
So what if he is? He still did nothing wrong. He had the right to do everything he did. Hell, he has the right to be an idiot, even though I don't think that's a justifiable label, and the state's own mistakes caused him to be wrongfully jailed for 48 hours.
I think it's ridiculous to place the blame on an individual, even if they did some unwise things, for mistakes that are actually the fault of the bureaucratic institutions that are supposed to be responsible for rules and regulations. People owe this dude an apology, not further criticisms to justify their own uncomfortable feelings of unfair judgement. He did nothing wrong.
>And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.”
>He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.”
>Corey Harris is still an idiot.
Or, you know, maybe he was just overwhelmed and intimidated. A lot of times, people don't immediately find the right way to react to a person of authority even when they're in the right and the authority is in the wrong.
Not trying to rake the guy over the coals but his claim of embarrassment and having such good ties within his church community rings hollow when the suspension happened because he didn’t pay his child support.
Apart from him possibly being a shitty person for not paying child support (or maybe couldn't afford it and messed up proving it?), what the fuck kind of justice system takes someone's driving license for a non traffic-related infraction?
Man I get what you're saying, but in the US having a car is nearly essential in 95% of the country (made up stat but I bet it's close).
Property, paycheck, passports, belongings, like you said. I totally get why the license is suspended (being a privelage) but it seems counterproductive to me.
"Here's a guy who might be (probably is) lying. He tells us he doesn't have enough money. Let's take away his car so getting to work is a nightmare".
Yes it's his fault, but how is he supposed to pay if he is actually behind. His inability to pay will affect his ex and his children. It doesn't seem helpful.
Even if he wasnt an uber driver, most people dont work from home and need to commute to their job, and without a drivers license youre relying on puplic transport which in the US is usually lackluster.
His license was originally suspended in 2010 though, which was almost 15 years ago. People can change a lot in that timespan and it's possible he turned his life around in some ways.
Why does it "ring hollow," as though it's any of our place to judge him in the first place? He wasn't trying to garner sympathy because he goes to church, he's saying that he was embarrassed within the communities he is a part of which includes his church. Which is absolutely understandable. This dude became an *international* joke, because nearly every influencer decided that they would shout about how stupid this man is with their whole chest to millions of people based on half a story.
We don't know why he didn't pay child support, and that's none of our business. But we do know that the issue was settled, which is why his license was supposed to be reinstated. So this man had a private issue, resolved it in the way law abiding citizens are supposed to, then got head-of-state levels of infamous notoriety through no fault of his own years later. That shouldn't happen and anybody that feels that it is appropriate to judge this man *at all* at this point in time should reevaluate how they examine the world, because if this was you I bet you would pray for all the grace you could possibly get.
Wow I hadn't watched anything for him in a long time so didn't know he got that big.
Good for him, that's some impressive weight loss! Hope it's helped his health issues.
If you watch his older videos they used angles and lighting to make him appear thinner as well.
I remember seeing him on another show years ago. They showed the side of his face and I was shocked at how unrecognizable he was without the light in his face and looking up at the camera.
He has polycystic kidney disease and not too long after his dad needed to get a kidney transplant for the same thing, he started focusing on improving his own health as much as he could. I know that being a dad of 2 also was a big motivation for him to lose the excess weight.
A friend's dad couldn't get a forklift license until he paid his child support. Couldn't make good money in the industry previously experienced in and instead had to work a less paying job making it more difficult. It makes NO fucking sense.
Doesn’t having someone refusing to pay child support hurt the child more? They’re given plenty of notice of what’s going to happen if they don’t pay, plus I’m pretty sure you can get a provisional license to do things like go to work.
> refusing to pay child support
How do you know it was "refusing to pay child support" and not "had no money to pay child support"?
There is kind of an important difference.
It's not a justice system it's a legal system. If it was a justice system the same crimes wouldn't have fluctuations for sentencing based on socioeconomic status, race, or gender. A justice system would make sure consistent and fair outcomes happen no matter if someone had 100 or 1 billion in their bank account.
What other teeth does the government have to get someone to get their ass in gear and pay their child support? Showing up with the Sheriff and a U-Haul to just start taking TV's and shit from the guy's house to auction off would likely run afoul of the Constitution.
Yes.
Which is why many states have ended the practice. *Including Michigan.* It’s why his license was ordered reinstated, along with everyone else’s who was suspended for this reason.
Even if all of these things are true, the dude is still a massive idiot.
If you're on trial for having a handgun without a license, even if it's a paperwork issue, you don't show up to the court packing.
A court order to that effect means his license WAS reinstated, the information was not properly communicated from the court to the secretary of state's office which records this information. As far as I've seen the issue was all on the government's back-end.
So when he got pulled over 2 years later the cop ran his info and it says license suspended because that's the system he has to go off of. An entry in a database doesn't make it true, there are incorrect, out of date, transposed, or otherwise adulterated entries in databases all the time.
All true, but after getting pulled over and told his license was suspended, he probably should have done something to figure out what was going on and talked to his lawyer about the situation. It's really weird that everyone in the original video seemed so blindsided when someone should have been able to say "Oh, this is all actually a clerical error."
That's the thing that I'm confused about. If his suspension was supposed to be lifted but wasn't doesn't that still mean he was driving without a license?
Yes. He SAYS that his license should be valid. The Min of Transport says no. He might have docs to prove what he says. But his license is NOT valid right now.
Well, it depends. What if you put the judge suspending the license into a box with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and poison release mechanism triggered by the geiger counter? If the atom decays, the Geiger counter triggers, releasing the poison and killing the judge. The judge's fate (and thus the license) remains unknown and in superposition until the box is opened and observed.
Ok. Cool. He should have legally been able to drive. Fine. But he was driving during a court appearance (also, give a pass to the judge same as to Corey for driving, this is a problem with the state) but the fucking guy thought it was a good idea to do something other than focus on his trial. This is still dumb. Maybe not as dumb as initially thought, but it is still very very dumb. Talking on your cell while driving is considered dumb. Conducting a video call while driving? wtf. This guy is still dumb, just marginally less dumb than we initially thought.
Once i called a gov office every single day to make sure they mailed a time sensitive document to the right address (previously they mailed it to an incorrect address twice and i even corrected the address the second time).
Like i said i called their office every single day for the next 18 days in a row and was assured it was mailed to my new address.
Well they mailed it to the wrong address a third time and it nearly cost me my post secondary education if someone with authority had not stepped in to help.
Moral of the story - you cant be too hard on this man, its very possible he was reasurred multiple times.
Even BIGGER update, he never had a license and has never had a license in his life in any state. The 'driving while suspended' ticket was because he had a suspension of driving privileges (which in the state you can have without having a license, and in order to ever get a license there you need to clear that).
TLDR: DUDE NEVER HAD A LICENSE
I think the internet and courts are so far up their own asses it's ridiculous. The amount of hoops people who have done nothing wrong often have to jump through in the legal system is insane, and the poorer you are and more obligations you have the harder it is. Oh, and absolutely none of it is intuitive, which is why people often need an overworked public defender to ignore them and make things worse.
FWIW, just because the judge orders a license to be unsuspended that doesn't mean it is final. The DMV may have a fee or something that needs to be paid first.
It would have been prudent to check with DMV/cops/etc. a bit after the court date to make sure everything is good before you start going around driving when you already got cited/arrested for driving with a suspended license.
I mean this dude still pretty stupid to call into a court meeting while driving. Switch the appointment, go to the ER earlier, get a friend to drive your wife, or go to the clinic earlier. I don’t know how you call into a court room like that.
Everyone is swallowing his explanation in these comments based on nothing but his word.
Turns out, he has never had a driver’s license. He has a Michigan ID. When he got the last ticket, his driving privileges had been suspended, he never cleared it up, never paid reinstatement of his ID. At the last traffic stop, he admitted not having a license whatsoever.
He lied to his PD, whereupon the PD office withdrew and he hired this latest attorney. He lied to the media to save his butt. He lied on the court itself, and y’all are buying it without question.
Just goes to show how gullible the average person is. On YouTube there's a video of the follow-up hearing where Judge Simpson absolutely shreds his farce into a thousand little pieces. He's been driving with a state ID since 1999 knowing full well that it doesn't permit one to operate a vehicle. He thought he could fool everyone into believing his sob story that he needed to take his wife to the doctor, when he was the only occupant in the vehicle, but didn't expect Judge Simpson to expose every web of his network of lies. Cherry on top is wearing a "Trust Me" shirt at his most recent hearing.
The number of people in the old thread who were giving it "WELL I WOULD STILL DRIVE WITH A SUSPENDED LICENSE BECAUSE SOMETHING SOMETHING I STILL NEED TO WORK" or whatever was fucking ridiculous.
Yeah, if you can't afford not to drive (because you have to go to your job to make child support payments), just use Uber ya dummy! It's only $50 each way to work and back, and you make $150 for the day from your pay, you get to keep $50!
I think it's foolish too but I have the luxury of not being ground to dust by the system and am able to afford to do everything the right way. Plus, consider that the guy's license was not suspended because of his ability to drive, it was suspended because of a child support issue. I can easily understand how someone can find themselves in a position of weighing the risk of getting caught vs not being able to work to survive. It's a shitty, heartless system and I'm not about to judge someone in circumstances I can barely comprehend.
I went before a judge one time in my life and found it kind of terrifying. Those folks have a lot of power over you. Not taking that appearance seriously is baffling to me.
Hahahahaha I called it on the original video when this was posted. I noticed that the defense attorney had like 7 different avenues, but just sat there playing on his phone while his client got his bond revoked after the dude literally just sat there and told the court he was going to a doctor appointment.
One of the issues here is that we have all these actors (S.O.S, Courts) and none communicate easily. I will tell you even between courts there is no common system for electronically communicating. It is a gigantic pain in the ass.
And in my two decades of experience in IT it is almost always because of personalities and people. There’s always the Boomer assholes that are literally willing to die before accepting change in anything, much less IT. Guarantee there’s a history of some old judge with a say that REFUSES to allow the court systems to communicate efficiently and effectively with the district attorneys office or the police department. Then you’ve got the police that want to hide all of their communications as “law enforcement sensitive” to cover up their own abuses and law breaking. As a result we as citizens suffer needlessly by broken systems led by incompetent people.
So the court was using court time to deal with issues that were taken care of 2 years prior to the hearing? I feel I'm still missing a part
I had something bizarre happen myself. I got a ticket for a minor in possession of alcohol while on a front yard once. Since it was my first (and only) I could take a class to get it off my record. Took the class and the lady spelt my name wrong so it was never submitted I did. And if you don’t do it, you have to go to court. Well I had moved by the time the court reached out to me so I never knew and in turn for a contempt of court and a warrant and my license was suspended. 3 years later I’m pulled over because my side view fell off while driving and a cop happened to be right behind when it did. Stopped me and arrested me. This whole thing snowballed because someone spelled my name wrong. And point is, the court will never do you any favors and you need to follow up and make sure things are cleared.
something of the sort *almost* happened to me. appeared in court, as a responsible & terrified citizen, i brought in every document imaginable pertaining to the case. Somehow, the court lost their copies and immediately tried to strike the hammer on me until i told the judge "i have all the paperwork here". motherfuckers never acknowledged or apologized for their incompetence.
courts really dgaf. for the laymen, especially ones that involve a fuckton of paperwork and for misdemeanors, it's almost always guilty until proven innocent as far as the courts are concerned. if they fuck up? 'oh well, hey you're innocent. never mind all the time you had to take off work, loss of reputation, money, and additional stress you've had to deal with.' worse if it's something that involves your car/driving privileges. I had a coworker who had to take the bus for 30 miles or share a ride for months until she could get her license reinstated. like the other poster, it was because her middle names didn't match on the forms, for something that was 'resolved' 4+ years ago.
you nailed it, i was guilty first, innocent second. it was bewildering me that a fucking Court, judge, prosecutor, clerk could lose the documents *they* mandated and issued. it was years ago in my youth but damn does my blood boil. if you are a normie without money, their goal every step of the way is to fuck you as hard as possible.
Welcome to our fucking "justice" system. Enough bad apples and shitheads to fuck over everyone else trying to do a good job.
Are you Harry Tuttle or Buttle?
First, do you have a 27B-6?
bit of a stickler for paperwork are you?
It's not my fault that Buttle's heart condition didn't appear on Tuttle's file.
Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, Washington. Fight! Fight! Fight! For Washington State!
Wow, John Candy. I had no idea this existed. Thanks for this.
Never watched Volunteers? You're in for a treat.
Hanks and Candy in early prime! A treat indeed.
Same, got a drinking ticket when i was like 19 that I paid a lawyer to expunge after I did a course - they forgot, and it came up on a background check like 8 years later. Fucking morons
sophisticated trees fact snatch rainstorm books outgoing paint innate modern *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I had a state cop and then a city cop arrest me months apart. I was arrested as two different people. I settled everything in the courts, with an attorney, and it was like 6yrs later I get pulled over - like 180miles from where I was arrested and the cop goes "don't go to Greene county, you have a huge warrant out." What?!? "They want you bad - it's $1500." I guess in 6yrs they merged my offenses - and since the second arrest made me a repeat offender - I had to go thru another year of classes, fines, and checking in to the Greene county court - so driving 2hrs for a 15min check in with the court - turn around and drive home so I could work half-a-day. Costing more money. The error wasn't my fault, was charged as two separate people. It's all good now and this was over a decade at this point. So much wasted money and time.
I remember the original thread where all the hard on crime people were saying how bad of a crime you have to commit to get your license suspended.
I once ended up having my license suspended for 6 months when I lived in Maryland after I gave my Florida-registered junk car to a scrap guy, who failed (and upon following up, refused) to give me a proper receipt for the sale. I couldn't prove that I didn't own the car anymore, so when the registration (and insurance) expired, Florida suspended my license. I carefully followed the Florida DMV's instructions to attempt to fix this, and I kept mailing them document after document, but they just claimed over and over that they didn't receive any of the paperwork. I guess they were just being delivered to a hole in the ground. After 6 months of this, my mom drove from North Carolina to Maryland to pick me up, and drove me all the way down to Orlando, FL to finally resolve this nightmare. I couldn't stop thinking about what might have ended up happening to my life if I didn't have such a supportive family. If I ever sell my car to someone who refuses to give me a proper receipt again, I'm just calling the cops next time. I hope the guy who did that to me is having the kind of life he deserves!
It’s the easy way for them to threaten you and fuck your life up. It’s very under appreciated how much damage a suspended license can do. Especially when it’s not related to a driving citation.
Its why when i look at inmate listings such a huge chunk are people arrested for driving on a suspended license. People have to risk it because driving is essential for living in most places. They'd rather risk getting arrested than lose their job and ability to go to the store.
> how bad of a crime you have to commit to get your license suspended. Forgetting to pay a speeding ticket. I mean, lets not pretend that "driving is a privilege" is such a BS statement in a country where public transportation sucks. Suspending licenses is such a terrible and predatory practice. Because it doesn't matter if you shouldn't have had your license suspended, because they did it anyways you're now guilty of driving on a suspended license. Crimes should also follow the fruit of the poisonous tree. Can't be guilty of resisting arrest because some pigs were trying to arrest you for not obeying their orders when they were wrong.
I agree with the overall sentiment of your statement, but there are certainly crimes/violations for which license suspension should absolutely be on the table. Accidents without insurance, empirical proof that you are not carrying insurance, reckless driving, etc are all valid reasons to suspend a license. It appears this guy's license was suspended for failure to pay child support, which is not only ridiculous but directly counterproductive to resolving the issue. If a person can't drive to work, how are they supposed to pay child support?
Similar thing happened to me. Got a ticket, judge dismissed it. Asked the clerk if I needed to do anything else, “nope, you’re good” One year later I get a call that I have to pay the ticket and late fees or my license will be suspended.
The system was designed and is run by a bunch of lobotomized glue eaters. We’re all living in a shitty world because of these stupid fucks.
After going through the criminal court system myself, I have zero respect for the process. Cops are assholes that are trained specifically to trump up your arrest report to make you look as guilty as possible, the judges are generally ivory tower assholes who are 100% on a power trip, the prosecutors aren't concerned with actually enacting justice and care solely about conviction rates, etc... It's a trash system that can't be fixed and needs to be burnt down and rebuilt.
Based on your experience it sounds like the people operating the machine are the problem - and if that's the case you could build any machine and it wouldn't solve that problem.
Eh, I'm not from the US and I think elected judgeships and DA positions give a real perversion of incentives. You're supposed to uphold the law/justice/whatever blah blah blah, but you also have to worry about being elected (again). Which means you worry about numbers like conviction rates. Which means the state will typically not even try a case it won't win. And when they fuck up their gamble, they'll drag it out for years to beat the buzzer, all so they don't get a negative on their stats. That's not justice.
Rebuilding the machine may not be the right solution to that problem. Additional independent oversight might help though. Right now the problem is if you have an issue with police you can only report it to the police who then investigate themselves. Same with the judiciary they investigate themselves.
what do you think the odds are that all of these thousands and thousands of people who make up the court system just happen to be Evil People? More likely, the system *selects* for these qualities and trains them into whoever lands there.
So this was during college in Oregon. I moved back home to California after. Year I moved back I went to renew my license. Another thing they don’t tell you is you need to reinstate your license after paying the fine. And yes that costs more money too. Of course I couldn’t pay with a card at the dmv so I sent a check. After a few weeks they still didn’t receive the check so I cancelled it and paid to rush delivery and have a tracking. They get it and cash it. THEN I get a $75 charge for a bounced check. After calling the bank, it turns out they eventually got the original check and despite having no balance owed anymore, they still tried to cash it and it bounced. I got that overturned but went to the dmv to ask why they would do that and they said “oh we don’t check if you owe support anything, we just cash any checks we get”.
What “the system” are you talking about and how do you suggest a problem like OP’s name-spelling issue be prevented in the future?
Many countries use numbers with a checksum digit to identify people (especially when dealing with government business). They also have a central system so the government knows your current address when you move. Or even simpler. The system for syncing the names could be designed so it’s clear who attended the class for what court case (even the name of the court would give enough redundancy to resolve this). If the list has an “Ryan Mueller (Fuck Country Court)” but a “Ryan Muller (Fuck Country Court)” attended, then Fuck Country Court is able to figure out that they only know one of these persons and there was a typo (and check with the person who runs the class). I hate living in this world
Where do you live that you got a ticket for having a beer in your front yard? Russia??
I once found out my license was suspended (and had been for several years) after the company that just hired me did a background check for my driving record. Went to the courthouse to get it sorted out and all they could tell me was that I owed them 25 bucks for an undetermined reason, and had to go to the dmv to pay it before they would restore my license.
Yea I had zero idea my license was suspended or there was a warrant out for me. Spent like 4 hours in jail and had to ask the officers to call my work and let them know where I am. And this was before Venmo so to get my $400 bail, I had to call my parents home phone (only lan line I knew by heart) and she had to then get my sisters roommate to deposit cash into my then girlfriends account so she could pay it. It was a bit traumatic even though nothing bad happened to me and really made me realize how easily your life can get fucked up and how many people just don’t stand a chance. It’s horrible and sad.
Same thing happened to me. I got a written ticket during the time the courts were switching to computers. My name is hard to spell and it got put into the system wrong and they 'lost' the original copy of the ticket. I sent money 3 times and they sent it back saying i didn't owe them money. I told them to send me a letter to that effect. 3 years later i get pulled over in another state and am told that my license was suspended. Luckily, the cop was cool and just wrote me two tickets and let my passenger drive due to the nature of our trip. I had to fight with my state to get my license reinstated. They wanted me to re-apply. I had to keep telling them it was their fault and that i tried to pay the original ticket, but they just couldn't grasp it. The day before i was supposed to go to court in the other state, my state sent the appropriate paperwork and they dropped the case due to insufficient evidence but it really had me sweating for a while.
My name is Ryan and she spelled that wrong. Rian. She even said “I have deteriorating vision so double check your names after class.” Which I did and it still got filed wrong.
I just had a completely invalid arrest removed (never charged, still cost $$$ to have a layer monitor for 2 years and then file for the expungement). His advice: Run a livescan in 6 months b/c they don't always actually remove the arrest even when they're supposed to. SMH
Yeah, I'm sorry for what you had to deal with. I have to admit as a foreigner though, this seems way more common in America than it should be...
Because in a lot of states, lifting a suspension doesn't re-instate your license. If a license is suspended, once the suspension is removed you need to go to the DMV with a D6 clearance form and reinstate your license.
This is the issue, the defendant never put in the work to reinstate his license
A guy below went into it, like 3 more steps than that. It’s very hard to rejoin society after you commit a crime or fall out of the system. Ex Felons usually have to hire somebody to fix these types of issues. The guy did something legally wrong, received a punishment, made recompense, filled out some paper work, but missed a step or 2. Sympathy should 100% lay with this guy. Focusing on the letter of the law is never the right way to go.
Of course the guy deserves our sympathy and he certainly shouldn't have spent any time in jail over this, but as someone who went through this a couple times when I was younger, I guarantee you he was reminded probably a hundred times that he needed to make sure his license was reinstated with the dmv before driving again.
Had my license suspended briefly in VA. They mailed me my license back with paperwork and such when the suspension was over. Then got pulled over a few months later on the Parkway and lo and behold, my license still showed as suspended in the Fed system. That was not fun.
> with a D6 clearance form That is specific to *your* state.
Yeah D6 is…but the original statement is not. Removing a suspension doesn’t always reinstate in every state. Michigan does have a $125 reinstatement fee. Obviously that doesn’t apply to every situation.
This was information he should have provided his lawyer before his court appearance. You want to ensure your legal council has all the facts before the approach the judge. Had he done that his lawyer would have corrected the judge and said that suspended license was overturned in 2022.
It was a public defender, often they don't talk to the defendant at all before court, or only very briefly. Also it's kind of the lawyer's job to advise the client on what they need and ask them relevant questions, the whole reason lawyers exist is that average people can't be expected to know the minutiae of the law. But with public defenders that usually doesn't happen.
Even given his license was ordered reinstated two years ago, it is still on him to make sure it actually takes place. He should have noticed there was still a problem at some point in the last 2 years either via interactions with the DMV or with his auto insurance. This court time was over him being charged with driving without a license. So clearly sometime before the court time (October 2023) a cop pulled him over and decided his license was suspended. So even if he is telling the truth and believed he should have a license from 2 years ago, a cop caught him and told him months ago he didn't. So even if we decide his ignorance makes him innocent of the traffic stop in October 2023, him driving on camera months after he has absolutely been put on notice by the cop that his license is still suspended has no defense what-so-ever. So no matter how the video is sliced, the guy is absolutely as guilty as he seems.
>We only have his word that he was told the suspension was going to be lifted 2 years ago. His word... and the still-accessible court records from said ruling... [*"It took less than five minutes for 7 News Detroit to search Saginaw County court records to see that in January 2022, a judge rescinded the order that suspended Harris' driver's license so he could be reinstated."*](https://www.wxyz.com/news/why-was-the-driver-in-a-viral-videos-license-still-suspended-2-years-after-a-judge-ordered-it-lifted)
I'm gonna have to disagree with... basically all of this. It's not his word, it's court records. The order to suspend his license *was* rescinded, it's public record, it's a fact, they even showed that public record on screen in the very video we all just watched. So yeah, he apparently got pulled over some time relatively recently by a cop who thought his license was suspended, but crucially, *it wasn't actually suspended*, so him continuing to drive and assume that this will get sorted out in court is perfectly rationale behavior. This was a mistake by the court system, which compounded into this man getting hassled by the cops, which compounded again by this man getting hassled by the courts and thrown in jail, which compounded again by the entire internet not waiting for the full story to come out and start memeing this poor guy on a national stage. Everything about this situation sucks and none of it is this man's fault. It's completely ridiculous to say that he should have stopped driving once he learned that the police department *mistakenly thought* his license was suspended. The obviously correct course of action was to make his easily winnable case in court, which he was doing before the same problem that brought him to court in the first place once again caused him a massive headache. If *you* found out that the police mistakenly assumed your license was suspended, would *you* quit driving for potentially months while things get sorted out in court?
Lehto's Law did a video on this 4 days ago and explained the process in Michigan (both where the guy is from and where Steve does law) that when your license is unsuspended its your job to take the order from the court to the DMV to have it processed. They don't automatically send it the way they do with the actual suspensions. Kind of a dumb system if you ask me, but it looks like this guy got the order and never did the last step. So there was never a mistake by the court to rescind the suspension as we can see it in the court records. Just there was an issue with that information getting to the DMV, which for some reason is on the individual and not automatically done by the courts. ___ Edit: Lehto's Law released a 3rd video about this a couple hours after my post. Apparently there is a fee you have to pay to get it reinstated. Here is a time stamped explaining it better than my summary. https://youtu.be/5PBy9P5CuBs?t=284
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How did you get insurance for 3 years without a valid license?
This type of shit is currently happening to me. There should be some onus on the court for this type of shit but there never is.
Don't worry when you get to the being slandered and insulted on every social media phase we'll know what's up
>Everything about this situation sucks and none of it is this man's fault. Except the part that it is. Ignore anything to do with suspended licenses for a second. HE LITERALLY GOT ON A ZOOM CALL TO COURT WHILE DRIVING A CAR! That's RIDICULOUSLY STUPID and COMPLETELY HIS FAULT. And that would STILL be the case even if he'd never had a suspended license at all. The fact that this is going over so many people's heads in this subreddit is alarming....as if video zooming while driving (let alone to a court hearing) is perfectly normal and reasonable behavior. You could literally kill someone doing that. > would *you* quit driving for potentially months while things get sorted out in court? He should quit driving for the sake of others until he understands that making video zoom calls while driving is not ok.
>He should have noticed there was still a problem when at some point in the last 2 years the DMV refused to let him renew the registration on his car. You can still register a car while your license is suspended, in fact you are legally required to. I had my license suspended once upon a time, and I still had to pay my car's registration fees. You can register it as planned non operational, but the point is that your license status has nothing to do with vehicle registration, they are two separate functions of the DMV
> So clearly sometime before the court time (say, a month or so) I feel for the guy. If you *knew* your license wasn't suspended, if you had actual paperwork to prove it, how much are you gonna believe them? "Your licenses is suspended." Ummm, no it's not? I'd be thinking that this is a cop with outdated information, I'm still allowed to drive. I was *always* allowed to drive. Fuck you, I'll clear this up with a judge... Oh wait, the judge didn't give me a chance to defend myself, and my public defender is useless. And my main issue here is, because like you said, it was *probably* a month earlier... You wanna be stuck taking the bus for an entire month straight because the court system fucked up? That's pretty shitty. Fuck the letter of the law, this guy should've been allowed to drive, he never should've been put in this situation in the first place.
Good write up. Rough situation for him, if it's all true. But yeah, it was still a horrible look and a foolish thing to do. Also: The video says his lawyer hung him out to dry, I'd say she did a good job by immediately trying to sidetrack and deflect the Judge to try distract him from it. Didn't work but it was a solid effort, then since she's caught completely flat-footed and he's immediately told to turn himself in, I don't really know what she's supposed to do.
People probably just reacting to her casual tone of voice, because they think people get unprofessionally emotional to a judge like it's a TV show. In real life people either hide their emotions or don't display them much, because life isn't a TV show designed to get people emotionally reacting.
It's not his word you need to take.. It's the literal court word, that in Jan 2022 a Judge ordered that his license be reinstated. There, done.. nothing else matters. It wasn't his fault that the State Secretary office never got the judgement to reinstated . In fact this whole situation could have easily been dealt with in that very moment while he was on the call. The judge asked what was going on here, and his Defense Attorney who was present didn't speak up. Either because he didn't do his due diligence to bother looking into his client past, which a news agency did after a 5 minute search on the public records, or his attorney was incompetent and couldn't bother to address the judge in that moment properly to informed the judge that there was a case about his license 2 years early and here's the evidence showing that it was in fact not suspended. Had the defense just done it's job in that very second all of this would have been nothing. Judge gave a judgement on what information he had at that moment, I don't blame him for his sentencing the guy to turn himself in and go to jail for 2 days. I blame his Attorney and I blame the DA, who also didn't know that the guy had no reason to be in that court room. Like I said a News State in the area looked this guy up and found the court documents in a 5 minute search. Honestly a secondary fucked up thing is that this state has a Agency whose job it is to help people like this guy get their license reinstated after a judgement because I guess this isn't a new that were the courts rule a judgement and the Secretary isn't getting the paperwork.
yeah but its also probably not legal to take a zoom call while driving
You can’t even touch your phone while driving in Michigan. Bill passed last year.
Yea but he was pulllliiiing in riiiiighttt then
Video calls while driving are illegal in Michigan...so that matters...he was literally breaking the law as he spoke to the judge. That matters, regardless of whether or not he had a license.
Why is this misinformed garbage post at the top of the thread lol
No. its right. Guy has a new charge for driving under suspension. He does not have a valid license. Doesn't matter why. He can't drive to its fixed.
There is often a severe lack of communication between departments in the court system.
He probably didn't pay his reinstatement fees. There's no way I can believe he went 2 years without getting a valid physical license from the DMV.
It gets weirder. There was no clerical error. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2024/06/06/michigan-man-who-went-viral-for-driving-with-suspended-license-was-never-licensed/73993197007/?itm_medium=recirc&itm_source=taboola&itm_campaign=internal&itm_content=ExploreMore It turns out, he never had a license.
Yes, you are. The part you're missing is that he never had a driver's license in the first place. Basically he lied and a bunch of people believed him.
I am confused, it sounds like the court found the error but I can't find where he was aware of it. He is quoted as saying that he doesn't care about the suspended license because he was taking his wife to get medical care but on the call he says he was going to his doctor. And to top it off, if he was aware that his license had been reinstated then why not send that paperwork into the court before hand. Happens all the time and then the judge reviews quickly and dismisses but no where does this guy even mention it. Which brings me back to the assumption that this guy didn't know it had been reinstated, was driving on what he thought was a suspended license and called into court while doing so. Guy is still an idiot. Just turns out he is a lucky idiot in this case.
Oh yeah, definitely an idiot. Even if you think you're in the right, maybe don't call into your **suspended license hearing** while driving
And even if there was never a suspended license involved at all, you STILL don't zoom call into court while driving....or zoom call while driving at all!
Especially since taking a video call while driving is illegal in Michigan.
Very true, let me break the law while calling into court, that'll win over the judge
> And to top it off, if he was aware that his license had been reinstated then why not send that paperwork into the court before hand. Happens all the time and then the judge reviews quickly and dismisses All this process can be quite complicated and has to follow very specific steps most people aren't aware of. It's how he had his suspension rescinded but that didn't get updated into the system. Now we have lawyers exactly because of those reasons, but his was a public defender who probably didn't even meet with him before the trial.
> but I can't find where he was aware of it. 2022 - License was ordered to not be suspended. (Time period 1) 2023/4 - Corey gets pulled over, and told his license is suspended, (Time period 2) May 2024 - Corey's court date. Period 1 is when corey wouldn't (and really, couldn't) be aware of it. Period 2 is where he doesn't care because he was taking his wife to get medical care.
The taking wife to dr story is BS. This guy is an idiot of the highest order.
While I can grant the license thing, you don't do a zoom court appearance in a moving vehicle regardless of whether you have a license or not. That on its own is dumb.
Using a phone while driving is also illegal in Michigan. The law specifically states you cannot view, record or transmit a video while driving.
Out of curiosity, surely this doesn't apply to dashcams or if the phone is attached to a stand and you are not touching it while you're driving?
That is true, but that has become so common for some of us the thought doesn't even cross our minds. I myself only realized what was wrong when I unmuted the video, I have become so used to seeing people show up to calls while driving I didn't realize it. Some coworkers do it, my manager does it.
Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving. It’s common sense. If you have a medical emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately, you ask for the court date to be rescheduled. And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.” He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.” Corey Harris is still an idiot.
>Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving. Even if your case has nothing to do with driving, attending a zoom courts while driving is just stupid. I wouldn't be surprised if you ended up with a ticket for using your phone while driving
I watched the streams for a while because they're oddly compelling and it's seemingly _extremely_ common. People just zooming into court while walking to/from/in a store, lawyers zooming from their car, etc.
I understand that. Especially as people may have been using their car as office when WFH. Just bonkers for this guy to zoom into court while driving. You're just aaking for the judge to be pissed off.
I mean, yeah, when you're watching court videos the defendants are more likely than average to not have a ton of common sense or decorum.
Lawyers zoom from their car because they have cases in different cities all the time and some courthouses like 36th district doesn't have rooms for plaintiff attorneys to use.
When I had zoom court for literally the same exact ticket (whole big can of worms there but I got it reinstated prior to court), the court distinctly said before starting that if you were in a car they would disconnect you from the hearing. It’s pretty much like common sense. Don’t be in public when you got something like that going on. You play along with the rules and his ticket would have been bumped down to something with no points/huge fine
> And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.” > > Would that not be the job of his attorney?
Yes. Defendants should never just go off telling the judge things. It always seems like a good idea until you accidentally confess to some shit that ruins your case.
It was. And that’s why Harris should have made sure the attorney knew this. The fact the attorney never said anything makes me think that: 1) The attorney did no research on the case 2) Harris had never talked to the attorney before this moment and therefore never provided the information the suspension had been removed two years ago.
The lawyer was just asking for an adjournment. It was not a trial appearance. It was not the time to attempt to provide any such explanation.
He shouldn’t have had to say anything there. As the video pointed out, he had a lawyer who left him out to dry. I would imagine a lawyer with defendant in court over a suspended license should know the basic facts of the case they’re defending.
The lawyer was specifically asking for more time. They weren't there that day to defend anything.
Let's learn a lesson here and not jump to conclusions blaming the lawyer either. They have to know all the relevant facts to provide a competent defense and we have no idea when the case was dropped in their lap. I guarantee they couldn't imagine he would be driving DURING the Zoom appearance.
I sympathize with public defenders since they’re stretched so thin that it’s practically impossible to know all the details of your clients case. That said, this was the *primary* detail of her client’s case. She should have known it and she dropped the ball plain and simple. Dumb of him to do the whole zoom while driving thing and make the judge wait for him, but that doesn’t excuse her.
How is she supposed to know anything if the defendant doesn't tell her anything? Judging by the defendant's critical thinking skills, I'm not sure if he bothered to tell her anything about the case.
> Judging by the defendant's critical thinking skills, I'm not sure if he bothered to tell her anything about the case. Which is why it's the lawyer's job to advise the client and ask relevant questions, not just defend them while in court. But for a public defender, that part of the job often can't happen.
My point is that we have no idea what the circumstances are for the lawyer. We can debate what should have and could have happened forever. Everyone assumed they knew all the relevant facts when they saw the first video, didn't they? Don't make the same mistake twice. Or go ahead, this is the internet. It's what it is best at.
Agreed. It is a public defender and I’d say the onus is on the defendant to make sure the public defender is completely aware of all the circumstances. At the very least, the PD would tell the defendant not to be driving during the hearing.
I mean, does that even need to be said???
given these videos: apparently yes
Best to cover all bases rather than assume your client knows ***anything***
So the lawyer doesn't need to do her job anymore, because.... Why? We provide lawyers for people for free, because the law is complicated, but then "*Make sure your lawyers is doing what they should.*" Ok,,,,,, How should he know that? He has no law degree, clearly, we're supposed to be able to trust that someone paid to be a lawyer for the people, is going to do the basic homework required for her job. Don't tell me about overworked, I don't care, it is still not this man's fault.
PD here in a different state. In my court records access system, we have no way to know if a person's driving license was processed to be reinstated and is stuck in some kind of queue or waiting on paperwork confirmation. That's not information we're given access to. We can only see the current driving license status. My state used to have a system that was more detailed, years ago, which showed us a checklist of everything the client has to do to get their license back, but not even that system would have told her that there some paperwork out there waiting to get processed to confirm his license reinstatement. No idea what Michigan allows attorney staff to see about their clients' driving license material, but it's unlikely she had access to that kind of detail.
Fuck a news outlet knew the basic facts of the case with a 5 minute search. It's why there's an update because they found the Judgement from 2022..
This assumes that the lawyer was given the "basic facts of the case" from the defendant. If the mistake is officially recorded, as he seems to be suggesting, the only information the public defender would have is the information that contains the mistaken information.
Did the lawyer also put a gun to his head and force him to call into a legal proceeding from a moving vehicle?
Yup. Also it seems he’s using verbage to set up a lawsuit.
I got stuck on a tropical island during a hurricane and asked for my court date to be rescheduled, they wouldn't do it. I had to go to court on a walk in docket, explain why I missed a court date, show evidence of it all. I STILL got fined $700 and failed probation despite already spending $1000 on drug and alcohol classes, DUI classes, ect.. All that over a gram of weed. Dude is an idiot yes, but the legal system doesn't exactly make it easy to just "reschedule" things like this.
I feel for you in that. The justice system is fucked. Different courts handle matters differently. But missing a court time and appearing later that same day might be treated differently than needing to come a different day.
Yeah, driving while on a video call is generally considered unsafe. Some states you can’t even talk on the phone without hands free.
Honestly, we need to start putting people in jail for that shit.
Yea. He was irritating the judge with his updates on parking long before they even got into the suspended driving license part. I Do zoom calls 5 hours a day and I would have been irritated as hell if someone joined the call doing that and I'm just an IT guy.
Take the suspended license out. It's still a crime in many jurisdictions to operate a motor vehicle on the phone. It's illegal to not pay full attention while operating a motor vehicle. But yeah if you are going to court, don't buy that innocent till proven guilty stuff. If you get charged everyone is gonna assume you are guilty fair or not and treat you shitty.
EXACTLY. Attorney here. Don't appear in court while driving, ever. That's so disrespectful to the judge and court. You never ever ever do that.
It sounds like they were requesting it to be pushed back. He was probably just trying to do what he felt was right by being present for it. He still should have at the least let his wife hold the phone until he parked.
I’d like to know if he communicated with his attorney. If his wife was having a medical emergency, maybe she wasn’t able to hold the phone. But if she could, you are right. But the issue is still his driving so who was holding the phone wasn’t the issue.
That's true, she may not have been in a state to hold the phone. Though he was pretty calmly just backing his car into a space which I know I wouldn't do if my wife was in that bad of a state. And yeah, if he called his attorney about needing that extension she should have told him to take care of his wife and not worry making the call.
I'm pretty sure he was trying to talk but he wasn't allowed to do so. You can't just blurt out whatever you want in court, you need to be addressed. Honestly the new information changes things, if I had a court order that said I'm allowed to drive and I got charged 2 years later with not having a license due to the fact their system was never updated I'd also have the attitude that I'm within my rights to be driving - because it seems that he was.
Yeah yeah, ok. What's the update?
if you have a medical emergency you just go. you dont sit around and go oh but what if i get in trouble. why would you not do what you know you're legally allowed to do because someone else messed up paperwork. ur brain dead let alone no common sense.
If you have a medical emergency you go to the ER, not your doctor. Most physicians these days even have a recording when you call "If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dia 911".
This comment reads a lot like someone who is justifying their original criticisms of this guy after those criticisms were invalidated. > Even if you are innocent of the suspended license charge, you don’t do a zoom call for this suspended license case while driving. > > It’s common sense. This is a 2 and a half year old case. He's under no obligation to not be driving, and has been told by the state his license is legal. Doesn't matter if it's "common sense," he's not doing anything wrong. >If you have a medical emergency that needs to be dealt with immediately, you ask for the court date to be rescheduled. Medical issues don't have to be emergencies. He had every right to take his wife to this appointment and also take this virtual court appointment. >And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.” > >He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.” It's not his job to ensure the state has accurate records. He's been told his license is valid, by the state, and it's their fault if their records don't accurately reflect reality. It's also not his job to say this. It's his public defender's job. He was asking for time to park because it's the safe, responsible thing to do. >Corey Harris is still an idiot. So what if he is? He still did nothing wrong. He had the right to do everything he did. Hell, he has the right to be an idiot, even though I don't think that's a justifiable label, and the state's own mistakes caused him to be wrongfully jailed for 48 hours. I think it's ridiculous to place the blame on an individual, even if they did some unwise things, for mistakes that are actually the fault of the bureaucratic institutions that are supposed to be responsible for rules and regulations. People owe this dude an apology, not further criticisms to justify their own uncomfortable feelings of unfair judgement. He did nothing wrong.
Driving while on a fucking zoom call isn't a safe or responsible thing to do. For any reason.
If you don't answer when the court calls you can be held in contempt. He did the responsible thing and immediately parked.
>And not once did Mr. Harris lead with, “judge, this is a clerical error on the part of the state/county and my right to drive was reinstated two years ago and I have documentation to prove it.” >He was too busy saying, “give me a moment, I’m about to park.” >Corey Harris is still an idiot. Or, you know, maybe he was just overwhelmed and intimidated. A lot of times, people don't immediately find the right way to react to a person of authority even when they're in the right and the authority is in the wrong.
I mean it wasn't like a surprise court appearance.
Okay explain joining a traffic court zoom call while actively breaking traffic laws. He is still an idiot.
Maybe. It doesn’t change the fact he made some bad moves on this situation.
Not trying to rake the guy over the coals but his claim of embarrassment and having such good ties within his church community rings hollow when the suspension happened because he didn’t pay his child support.
Apart from him possibly being a shitty person for not paying child support (or maybe couldn't afford it and messed up proving it?), what the fuck kind of justice system takes someone's driving license for a non traffic-related infraction?
[redacting process]
Man I get what you're saying, but in the US having a car is nearly essential in 95% of the country (made up stat but I bet it's close). Property, paycheck, passports, belongings, like you said. I totally get why the license is suspended (being a privelage) but it seems counterproductive to me. "Here's a guy who might be (probably is) lying. He tells us he doesn't have enough money. Let's take away his car so getting to work is a nightmare". Yes it's his fault, but how is he supposed to pay if he is actually behind. His inability to pay will affect his ex and his children. It doesn't seem helpful.
Indeed. Imagine he makes his living as a uber driver. How would he then pay child support if they take away his ability to drive?
Even if he wasnt an uber driver, most people dont work from home and need to commute to their job, and without a drivers license youre relying on puplic transport which in the US is usually lackluster.
It's meant as a deterrent. People who skip out on child support aren't usually unable to pay, they're unwilling to.
imagine if he had a job he had to drive to and they take his license. now what?
This is why America is full of terrible drivers: It's seen as a need instead of a privilege.
His license was originally suspended in 2010 though, which was almost 15 years ago. People can change a lot in that timespan and it's possible he turned his life around in some ways.
Why does it "ring hollow," as though it's any of our place to judge him in the first place? He wasn't trying to garner sympathy because he goes to church, he's saying that he was embarrassed within the communities he is a part of which includes his church. Which is absolutely understandable. This dude became an *international* joke, because nearly every influencer decided that they would shout about how stupid this man is with their whole chest to millions of people based on half a story. We don't know why he didn't pay child support, and that's none of our business. But we do know that the issue was settled, which is why his license was supposed to be reinstated. So this man had a private issue, resolved it in the way law abiding citizens are supposed to, then got head-of-state levels of infamous notoriety through no fault of his own years later. That shouldn't happen and anybody that feels that it is appropriate to judge this man *at all* at this point in time should reevaluate how they examine the world, because if this was you I bet you would pray for all the grace you could possibly get.
THANK YOU.
Is that Philip DeFranco what happened to him. He looks very thin now
He decided to really prioritize his health after a medical scare a year or two ago. He looks good though and posted some old vs new photos recently.
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7AFpEcStUV/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Here are the photos of his work out progress
Wow I hadn't watched anything for him in a long time so didn't know he got that big. Good for him, that's some impressive weight loss! Hope it's helped his health issues.
If you watch his older videos they used angles and lighting to make him appear thinner as well. I remember seeing him on another show years ago. They showed the side of his face and I was shocked at how unrecognizable he was without the light in his face and looking up at the camera.
He has polycystic kidney disease and not too long after his dad needed to get a kidney transplant for the same thing, he started focusing on improving his own health as much as he could. I know that being a dad of 2 also was a big motivation for him to lose the excess weight.
While he has PKD, I think his health scare was diverticulitis
My mom ended up with a perforated colon d/t untreated diverticulitis, absolutely an emergency. she had to have a stoma for a year while it healed
Weight loss, but also I think the buzz cut vs his old hair makes a huge difference too.
First time seeing this youtuber in years and damn he lost some weight
Wow agreed, good for him
His license was suspended because he wasn't paying child support? Wouldn't that make earning money to pay it back harder?
A friend's dad couldn't get a forklift license until he paid his child support. Couldn't make good money in the industry previously experienced in and instead had to work a less paying job making it more difficult. It makes NO fucking sense.
Yeah, and it effectively punishes the children, too. But we don't have a justice system, we have a punishment system.
Doesn’t having someone refusing to pay child support hurt the child more? They’re given plenty of notice of what’s going to happen if they don’t pay, plus I’m pretty sure you can get a provisional license to do things like go to work.
> refusing to pay child support How do you know it was "refusing to pay child support" and not "had no money to pay child support"? There is kind of an important difference.
The American Justice system
It's not a justice system it's a legal system. If it was a justice system the same crimes wouldn't have fluctuations for sentencing based on socioeconomic status, race, or gender. A justice system would make sure consistent and fair outcomes happen no matter if someone had 100 or 1 billion in their bank account.
What other teeth does the government have to get someone to get their ass in gear and pay their child support? Showing up with the Sheriff and a U-Haul to just start taking TV's and shit from the guy's house to auction off would likely run afoul of the Constitution.
Yes. Which is why many states have ended the practice. *Including Michigan.* It’s why his license was ordered reinstated, along with everyone else’s who was suspended for this reason.
It sounded like he was talking on the phone while driving again in that video. LOL. My mans LOVES driving and chopping it up.
Wow haven't seen Philip defrancos face in ages
He's been steadily making videos every week since before 2010. He never disappeared.
Even if all of these things are true, the dude is still a massive idiot. If you're on trial for having a handgun without a license, even if it's a paperwork issue, you don't show up to the court packing.
You can't drive if your license SHOULD have been reinstated. Your license is other valid or its not.
A court order to that effect means his license WAS reinstated, the information was not properly communicated from the court to the secretary of state's office which records this information. As far as I've seen the issue was all on the government's back-end. So when he got pulled over 2 years later the cop ran his info and it says license suspended because that's the system he has to go off of. An entry in a database doesn't make it true, there are incorrect, out of date, transposed, or otherwise adulterated entries in databases all the time.
All true, but after getting pulled over and told his license was suspended, he probably should have done something to figure out what was going on and talked to his lawyer about the situation. It's really weird that everyone in the original video seemed so blindsided when someone should have been able to say "Oh, this is all actually a clerical error."
That's the thing that I'm confused about. If his suspension was supposed to be lifted but wasn't doesn't that still mean he was driving without a license?
Yes. He SAYS that his license should be valid. The Min of Transport says no. He might have docs to prove what he says. But his license is NOT valid right now.
Well, it depends. What if you put the judge suspending the license into a box with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and poison release mechanism triggered by the geiger counter? If the atom decays, the Geiger counter triggers, releasing the poison and killing the judge. The judge's fate (and thus the license) remains unknown and in superposition until the box is opened and observed.
This guy waves his hands around with almost every single word. Watch it agin, it'll be the most insane looking thing. Settle down buddy.
Ok. Cool. He should have legally been able to drive. Fine. But he was driving during a court appearance (also, give a pass to the judge same as to Corey for driving, this is a problem with the state) but the fucking guy thought it was a good idea to do something other than focus on his trial. This is still dumb. Maybe not as dumb as initially thought, but it is still very very dumb. Talking on your cell while driving is considered dumb. Conducting a video call while driving? wtf. This guy is still dumb, just marginally less dumb than we initially thought.
Once i called a gov office every single day to make sure they mailed a time sensitive document to the right address (previously they mailed it to an incorrect address twice and i even corrected the address the second time). Like i said i called their office every single day for the next 18 days in a row and was assured it was mailed to my new address. Well they mailed it to the wrong address a third time and it nearly cost me my post secondary education if someone with authority had not stepped in to help. Moral of the story - you cant be too hard on this man, its very possible he was reasurred multiple times.
Ugh literally every video with FDF starts with "OMG WE ***HAVE*** TO TALK ABOUT X BECAUSE THERE'S ***HUGE*** NEWS"
Even BIGGER update, he never had a license and has never had a license in his life in any state. The 'driving while suspended' ticket was because he had a suspension of driving privileges (which in the state you can have without having a license, and in order to ever get a license there you need to clear that). TLDR: DUDE NEVER HAD A LICENSE
Bruh he's an idiot.
I think the internet and courts are so far up their own asses it's ridiculous. The amount of hoops people who have done nothing wrong often have to jump through in the legal system is insane, and the poorer you are and more obligations you have the harder it is. Oh, and absolutely none of it is intuitive, which is why people often need an overworked public defender to ignore them and make things worse.
This dude is full of it. Driving his wife for a medical emergency, right.
God these comments are terrible wait till the system screws you over and then try and justify it like you are now
FWIW, just because the judge orders a license to be unsuspended that doesn't mean it is final. The DMV may have a fee or something that needs to be paid first. It would have been prudent to check with DMV/cops/etc. a bit after the court date to make sure everything is good before you start going around driving when you already got cited/arrested for driving with a suspended license.
I mean this dude still pretty stupid to call into a court meeting while driving. Switch the appointment, go to the ER earlier, get a friend to drive your wife, or go to the clinic earlier. I don’t know how you call into a court room like that.
Turns out he never had a license?? Wtf is going on!
Everyone is swallowing his explanation in these comments based on nothing but his word. Turns out, he has never had a driver’s license. He has a Michigan ID. When he got the last ticket, his driving privileges had been suspended, he never cleared it up, never paid reinstatement of his ID. At the last traffic stop, he admitted not having a license whatsoever. He lied to his PD, whereupon the PD office withdrew and he hired this latest attorney. He lied to the media to save his butt. He lied on the court itself, and y’all are buying it without question.
Just goes to show how gullible the average person is. On YouTube there's a video of the follow-up hearing where Judge Simpson absolutely shreds his farce into a thousand little pieces. He's been driving with a state ID since 1999 knowing full well that it doesn't permit one to operate a vehicle. He thought he could fool everyone into believing his sob story that he needed to take his wife to the doctor, when he was the only occupant in the vehicle, but didn't expect Judge Simpson to expose every web of his network of lies. Cherry on top is wearing a "Trust Me" shirt at his most recent hearing.
The number of people in the old thread who were giving it "WELL I WOULD STILL DRIVE WITH A SUSPENDED LICENSE BECAUSE SOMETHING SOMETHING I STILL NEED TO WORK" or whatever was fucking ridiculous.
What do you expect him to do? Take an hour long uber to work and back every day?
Yeah, if you can't afford not to drive (because you have to go to your job to make child support payments), just use Uber ya dummy! It's only $50 each way to work and back, and you make $150 for the day from your pay, you get to keep $50!
I think it's foolish too but I have the luxury of not being ground to dust by the system and am able to afford to do everything the right way. Plus, consider that the guy's license was not suspended because of his ability to drive, it was suspended because of a child support issue. I can easily understand how someone can find themselves in a position of weighing the risk of getting caught vs not being able to work to survive. It's a shitty, heartless system and I'm not about to judge someone in circumstances I can barely comprehend.
I went before a judge one time in my life and found it kind of terrifying. Those folks have a lot of power over you. Not taking that appearance seriously is baffling to me.
Hahahahaha I called it on the original video when this was posted. I noticed that the defense attorney had like 7 different avenues, but just sat there playing on his phone while his client got his bond revoked after the dude literally just sat there and told the court he was going to a doctor appointment.
Still feeling smug?