Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Court supervision for minors

As of January 1, 2008, drivers under the age of 18 are ineligible for court supervision unless they make a personal appearance in court with a parent or guardian and agree to complete a traffic safety course. Judges have the authority to waive the appearance of the parent or guardian upon a showing of good cause by the defendant. 730 ILCS 5/5-6-1(m).

I have had this situation arise twice in the past month. Both times my clients agreed to take the traffic course to get supervision, but neither ASA (Kane and DuPage) asked if my clients' parents were present (they were). I just learned about this parental appearance requirement when I got back to the office and looked up the statute relating to the traffic school requirement.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FYI, a lot of changes came to be as of Jan. 1, 2008. This includes automatic suspension of a minor's DL if the minor takes even a court supervision for illegal consumption/possession. It doesn't matter whether the minor was in the car when he was caught. Maybe a topic for a future blog?

Michael W. Huseman said...

Good idea Desiree.

Contact me directly if you would like access to write your own posts. We'd love to have you.

husemanlaw@gmail.com