Author: Shawn K. Quinn

Ordinarily I don’t push stories to the top of the queue when I have a backlog, but it’s late, I’m bored, and the topic I really need to be blogging about is going to take a couple of days to put together.

Yahoo News reported a story which was originally featured in Lehigh Valley Live, about Lynda Farley, driver of the “Liberty Van” which is covered with tons of political messages. On the way back from September 11 ceremonies in New York City, Lynda was cited for driving with an obstructed view (the windshield is bordered with flowers). The citation carries a maximum fine of $56. Instead of just rolling over and paying the fine like most people, Lynda contested it, and appealed the initial guilty verdict. And won. It took over 5000 miles of driving totaling over 100 hours on the road, and undoubtedly expenses which dwarfed the original fine amount.

But she won, and that leads me into a commentary about the sad state of our so-called justice system, especially at the lower levels such as traffic tickets.

At one time in the distant past (17th century or earlier), most charges brought up in court were taken to trial. Pleas of guilty and thus plea bargains as we know them today were rare. As more and more cases clogged the courts, plea bargains became the norm to keep backlogs to a reasonable length.

By the time motor vehicles became common place, so had the plea bargain. Every traffic ticket fine schedule is a plea bargain which the court will accept if one pleads guilty, pays the ticket, and waives the right to a trial. Take it to trial and lose, and what could have been only a $56 ticket (in this case) could easily become $400 or more after court costs and, in some cases, the arresting officer’s hourly wages to come and testify against one in court (which is just plain outrageous if you ask me).

While plea bargains are perhaps better known from legal drama TV shows for felony cases, it is the traffic tickets where they are most successful, followed closely by certain misdemeanors. Misdemeanor plea bargains have a similar premise, with the idea that (in the case of class B and A in Texas) usually the defendant is in jail with no realistic hope of getting bonded out. So, the prosecutor offers “time served” in exchange for a guilty plea. Defendants in this situation have a lose-lose decision in front of them: take it, and get another case on their record; decline it, keep the possibility of a clean(er) record and stay in jail for what may be another month to most of a year depending on how many cases are on the docket.

And people wonder why I have such issues with our excuse for a justice system. This problem may be specific to the US and certain other countries. According to Wikipedia, the “trumped up charges” tactic by which many US prosecutors secure a large number of guilty pleas is forbidden by the UK prosecutors code. It’s an admittedly rare case of the UK getting something right, in my opinion.

Lynda shows us that beating a penny-ante traffic ticket the same way most would contest an assault case is technically possible, but financially infeasible especially when the court is in another state, or far away from home. Of course, the cops know this. They want every ticket they write to just be paid (or maybe dismissed with the safety course for states such as Texas that offer the option) without a second thought.

Finally, some advice for those stuck with a traffic ticket. I will conclude by saying that I’ve had at least three traffic tickets dismissed just by setting them for trial. Show up, officer/witness doesn’t show, case dismissed. Sometimes they do show, but if you are ready for trial with an attorney, there may be more than, say, four cases that potentially make it to trial that day. If it’s the end of the day and your case hasn’t been heard yet, I have heard usually (Harris County and Houston) it gets dismissed. Of course this may vary.

Last but certainly not least, since this really, really bugs me the more I think about it. If the court is one of the obnoxious ones that tries to stick you for the wages of the cop testifying against you, and the case gets dismissed or you are found not guilty, consider invoicing the city for your time, attorney’s fees, and actual expenses. Push it as far as you are comfortable with, but I feel one will have excellent odds pointing out the clear inequity in being asked to pay for prosecution expenses and just being out one’s own expenses if one prevails.

A recent Alternet article expresses a great deal of criticism against McDonald’s for its lack of funding of its charity Ronald McDonald House (RMH). The key facts from this article (and the report linked from it, titled “Clowning Around with Charity”) that I found most shocking:

• McDonald’s only provides 20% of the funding for RMH globally.
• McDonald’s spends almost 25 times as much on advertising as they do on charitable donations. (That’s a little over 4 cents in donations for every $1 on ads.)
• One of RMH’s projects, the “Tooth Truck” in the Ozarks, is 50% funded by Medicaid, with the other 50% funded by community donations, and it would appear zero coming from McDonald’s themselves.
• McDonald’s raked in $27 billion last year, yet contributes only 0.08% of revenue to charity versus an industry average of 0.12%. (While the difference may seem small as a percentage, when multiplied by $27 billion you get $21.6 million and $32.4 million, or a difference of $10.8 million.)

• McDonald’s claims the “donation box” contributions to RMH, which came from the customers’ own pockets, as its own.

The last two of these I find particularly troubling. For one, McDonald’s themselves barely has any business touching the money dropped into the change boxes to count it, let alone claim it as though it came from the company. It also doesn’t sit well with me that the RMH brand name sits on a project which McDonald’s themselves didn’t fund at all (and by extension, McDonald’s gets free brand PR benefit). How many other “Tooth Trucks” are out there?

To the Houston community and myself, the late timing of this article couldn’t have been more unfortunate. It came less than two weeks after Twestival Houston had come and gone, and most of two months after it would have done the most good. Twestival Houston, in the end, selected our local RMH chapter as the beneficiary. I was on the committee for Twestival Houston, and at least had some say in which six charities would be on the ballot to be voted on by the community to be our ultimate beneficiary. (I nominated Texas Children’s Hospital, which did not make the cut, and I am fine with that.)

I like what RMH does. I have no regrets about helping a fundraiser for RMH which benefits their mission. Given a chance to do it all over again, I would. But none of the goodwill I have towards RMH transfers to McDonald’s. None of it. In fact I consider McDonald’s getting free brand PR from RMH to be a liability on RMH, not an asset.

I don’t like that McDonald’s is being as stingy as they think they can get away with, contributing an abysmal 20% of the funding while enjoying 100% of the brand PR. I already no longer eat at McDonald’s restaurants for unrelated reasons, and have given them only a nominal amount of business in the past year. I think it crosses all sorts of common sense ethical boundaries for McDonald’s to do what they are doing with RMH and I would like to think

McDonald’s has at least two good choices that resolve this ethical problem:

1. Change the name of RMH to something that no longer confuses the public into thinking McDonald’s funds all or most of it. Quit licensing the McDonald’s brand to RMH. Continue funding the charity at a comparable level to the status quo, while inviting other companies (like perhaps Coca-Cola) to pick up the slack.
2. Fund RMH like a company that makes $27 billion in revenue should fund a charity from which it derives such a large brand PR benefit. In line with this, McDonald’s should also make sure its employees are paid a living wage at corporate stores, and that its franchisees also do the same. An apology for falling way short of how a company that makes $27 billion in revenue should have been doing business in the past few years would be appreciated as well, but I’m not holding my breath.

McDonald’s should be giving to its charitable causes, not taking from them to pad its profits. I’d like to think no other company of similar size and stature would dare try to get away with this. Please realize there are other choices besides McDonald’s when it comes to fast food.

As many of you may know, I have been a participant in the Extra Life fundraising campaign since 2010, the last year that the sole beneficiary was Texas Children’s Hospital (in 2011 it would be expanded to raise funds for all Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in the US and Canada). Yesterday evening through this morning (I’m writing this late Sunday night) we wrapped up another overnight gaming marathon and it will be recapped on my other blog, Quinn’s Big City,which I am slowly but surely getting back to posting to. Suffice it to say it was probably about as wild a party as we could possibly have had without alcohol.

But that’s not the reason for this post. Before leaving for my night of game-filled zaniness, I first had to drop a few dollars in the hat. That “hat” was across cyberspace on the Extra Life website. And instead of getting there, I kept getting a “Connection timed out” error. I would find out later that the Extra Life website was affected by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. At first the reports were worded such that the attack could have been aimed at another site at the datacenter. However, as a second, third, and fourth attack would hit later that night, I’m strongly convinced now that Extra Life was in fact the main target of the DDoS attacks and not merely collateral damage.

Now when DDoS attacker-activists hit the websites of the RIAA, the MPAA, the US Copyright Office, Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, the FBI, the NSA… it’s either crystal clear what their message is or at worst, it can be deduced with a little detective work. And in some cases at least it makes sense. The act still violates the letter of the law and is usually a felony, though we still have jury nullification so a conviction is far from guaranteed.

I fail to get what anyone gains from keeping people from donating to a charity. The publicity, if anything, has led to an increase in donations when the site was eventually brought back up. And the donation period for Extra Life actually extends through December 31 (there’s an official make-up date for the marathon as well as time allowed for cash and check donations to be turned in). Not only do these DDoS attacks on the Extra Life website make no sense to me, but I find it especially horrifying that someone would attack a charitable effort, especially one of this type. I hope whoever is behind this gets caught and, perhaps more importantly, that we find a way to prevent this kind of thing going forward.

By the way, the fundraising total is over $3.6 million as of this morning. So besides getting the attacks into the news, the DDoS attackers didn’t really succeed in anything besides incurring civil and criminal liability for themselves. Put another way: Charitable gamers 4, DDoS attackers 0.