Illegal AARTO 03 Infringement Notices From JMPD.
Fines issued from April to July 2010 have been illegally issued!
So you have received a fine from the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department (JMPD) after the "pilot phase" of AARTO came to an end on 1 April 2010 and have nearly suffered heart failure when seeing the harsh fine that accompanies it eh?
Clearly you are the driver or owner of a vehicle registered to a company or other juristic person. If so, read on, but you should also pay close attention if you are a private vehicle owner. We will put this in simple point form so you may easily understand that you should not pay these fines and will be entitled to your money back if you already have paid!
Why? Because from sometime towards the middle to last week of April 2010, the JMPD has been illegally issuing and serving AARTO 03 (usually electronic or "speeding") infringement notices. Not only is the tripled fine value applied to juristic persons not applicable yet (but will be after 1 April 2011) but these notices have been sent out via standard surface mail, where the AARTO Act specifically and clearly prescribes that they MUST be served via REGISTERED MAIL if not served in person.
JPSA will help you have your fine withdrawn and if you already have paid, recover your money. Even if by some decree, all fines issued like this get withdrawn automatically, you should not be prepared to wait indefinitely for refunds on fines you have already paid, like has happened with the decree of fine withdrawals from 2008 when the JMPD did not comply with the law. Many, if not most of those have not yet been refunded.
Obviously if you have received a "ticket" from a traffic officer at the time of which you committed the infringement, then this will not apply to you, but if you have received one of those dreaded speeding fines in the post it most certainly does.
The easiest way to identify if you have received an invalid AARTO 03 notice will be to look at the notice itself and check the following:
This is how a correctly issued and served notice should be addressed but don't stop reading if yours looks like this:
The image above is of a "registered" or "secure mail" article sent by the JMPD. Those issued by the RTMC on behalf of the TMPD will have the letters RTM in the bottom right hand corner of the sticker. This is how all AARTO 03 notices should be sent out. Who sent it is irrelevant.
Below is how they are being sent out by the JMPD from around the beginning of May:
This is ordinary surface mail and is completely illegal. The decision to adopt this method of posting was taken unilaterally and was not tabled in parliament or promulgated as an amendment to the Act.
Then there is the return address box, where the "date of posting" is supposed to appear. This is the date on which the countdown is supposed to start for your 32 day discount and when sent via registered mail, 10 days are allocated from this date for the notice to be deemed to have been delivered if you don't bother to collect it from the post office. If however it was sent via registered post and you did (or did not) collect it, this date does not bear much relevance, except for the fact that it is part of the prescribed layout under the AARTO regulations.
If the notice was sent via standard surface mail, a nonexistent date means that you will never be deemed to have been served with this notice and your 50% discount period would be effective... forever! The mere absence of this "date of posting on a correctly served notice would be a very weak argument if there are no other flaws in the the notice so please do not jump the gun and register your notice if it was sent via registered mail and the fine has not been tripled.
You may also notice that a "squashed" photo of your vehicle appears in the space where your number plate should be - like this:
And if yours is a vehicle registered to a juristic person then the penalty amount will probably be, well as many have put it, "outrageous!", just like the example above - because it would have been tripled.
If you have fallen victim to this anomaly, then JPSA has the solution for you, even if you have paid the fine/s already.