County to reimburse those wrongfully ticketed

MIAMI (WSVN) -- After a South Florida trooper issued hundreds of bogus citations to innocent drivers, the county has promised to reimburse the victims.

Florida Highway Patrol trooper Paul Lawrence was released from jail Tuesday night, after FHP arrested him on 22 counts of official misconduct. Prosecutors said he wrote nearly 100 fake traffic citations.

The state believes he used information from old citations to issue new ones to drivers who, in some cases, were not even in the country at the time of the alleged infraction. Those cases have been dismissed.

Manuel Carmaes runs the traffic and misdemeanor division of the Miami-Dade County Clerk of Courts. This arrest has caused his office to work overtime. "Unbelievable, couldn't figure out why a person would do that. That is being very naive," Carmaes said. "Our system automatically generates reports after the tickets are dismissed, if there was money allocated to that citation."

Those who paid will be refunded within two to three weeks. If you are not on the list of tickets already dismissed, and you feel that you were victimized by Lawrence, contact the clerk's office, and your case will then go before a judge, or you can hire your own attorney who can fight the ticket for you before a judge. "They should approach us, and we will make a motion to the court, and if the court rules that it should be dismissed, it will be dismissed," Carmaes said.

The people who deal with traffic tickets inside the court house said they have never seen anything like this before. "I've been here for 17 years, and it is a first," said Ricky Schechtman Sill, Sr., Deputy Clerk of Courts. They said, in this case, they have identified about 85 victims.

In an interview Tuesday, Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle also said she could not figure out why the trooper issued all the false citations. "I don't know whether he thought that there was some promotion that was looming in the future, he might be advanced if he had more citations. It was really a foolish thing to do. I mean, it just strikes at the very core of integrity and honesty," she said.

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