How Texas driver licenses get suspended, what OMNI holds mean, and why simply paying old tickets can trigger convictions, re-suspension, and added fees.
Legislators appear enamored with holding driver licenses hostage. When I started as a lawyer, I discovered at least 17 different ways people could lose their licenses.
Licenses can be invalidated for not paying child support, conviction of possession of marijuana and other drugs, driving while license invalid, refusal to provide a breath sample after a dwi arrest, providing a breath sample over .08 after a dwi arrest, providing driving while intoxicated, getting more than one conviction for not having insurance, driving under the influence (underage drinking), and habitual violator of traffic laws, to name a few. An invalid driver license seems like a tool to combat people doing dangerous things.
On the surface, the Legislature seems to make some sense. Having your license suspended is especially painful. Increasing pain when people engage in undesirable behavior seems to be a good idea to curb the behavior. Unfortunately, everyone else who is in the invalid license web may be trapped in a system they cannot escape, and the idea of reducing the undesirable behavior is defeated by the very mechanism to do the opposite.
Courts rulings have long supported lawmakers’ love affair with suspensions, since the courts have consistently supported the position a driver license is a privilege, not a right. Ask yourself how free your life would be without the ability to drive. If you don’t have public transportation available to you, you could effectively become unemployable, among other limitations.
The notion of a license suspension is “punishment” has been consistently ridiculed, despite the fact losing one’s driver license easily can have more devastating consequences than a short jail sentence or a fine. Nonetheless, courts show no sign of changing their rulings.
Therefore, unlike a right you may assert to protect yourself, your privilege to drive can come with just as many strings as the Legislature can conjure.
Some suspensions are plainly applicable to public safety and a direct response to dangerous driving. If a drunk driver is convicted of hurting or killing someone in a crash, it’s not a stretch to say that person should lose the “right”/”privilege” to drive.
Others, however, are head scratchers.
For instance, consider the person who was convicted of possessing the least little bit of marijuana, an amount barely able to register on a scale. By virtue of the conviction alone, the person’s driver license is suspended for 180 days. Mind you, the suspension needs to have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with driving or being in a motor vehicle.
To further confuse me, the Texas Legislature assigns the same 180-day suspension to the person convicted of possessing thousands of pounds of marijuana. The suspension is the same.
The people dealing drugs to school kids or transporting for a cartel to earn thousands of dollars are treated the same as the teenager caught with a single joint in his pocket while leaving a concert.
Another head-scratcher is people behind on child support. Despite the fact courts can order such people into jail for not paying, suspending their driver licenses apparently needs to happen, too. Although bailing out on child support is not in the public interest, it seems a license suspension makes most people less able to earn money; reliable transportation is routinely one of the most important aspects of employment.
Reform is clearly due. It’s time the Legislature started using something other than the hammer of license suspension to respond to the myriad issues it faces.
Millions of people in Texas simply don’t show up to court or otherwise take care of their tickets. Reasons vary from forgetfulness to fear to outright defiance. Regardless of the reason, it creates a massive caseload of “old” tickets.
Literally millions of unpaid/skipped-out-on-court tickets are outstanding in Texas. The sheer volume is so vast many courts will not bother issuing arrest warrants because the statewide system to notify law enforcement of warrants would be overwhelmed. Traffic warrants are typically enforced locally, although exceptions exist. Also, arresting people who are not local to the issuing court is futile because the arrestee may be hundreds of miles from the issuing court. Local jails don’t want to take up their already overcrowded cells with some other city’s traffic cases. In short, it is impractical to issue warrants for traffic tickets.
There is another way to handle this problem, and it’s called OMNI, a database of outstanding tickets maintained with a clever means of forcing people to take care of their tickets.
OMNI “holds” are placed on a person’s driver license by the court where the ticket is pending. Two reasons justify a hold: 1) failure to pay fines owed; and 2) failure to appear for court. A hold prevents the person from renewing his/her license until the hold is resolved, which may be done by paying the ticket, posting a bond, or otherwise satisfying the issuing court. Therefore, when people attempt to renew their driver licenses, they are faced with their past.
Many people wind up paying not only fines for the ticket they got, but additional fines for the offense of failure to appear for court, as well as “collection” fees and a $30 fee to release the OMNI hold itself. It is common for people to have more than one charge and pay $1,000+ to pay off everything so they can renew their licenses.
OMNI is a potent tool to resolve the problem of millions of outstanding tickets. Dealing with it yourself, however, can be fraught with danger.
Simply paying what the court is demanding will result in convictions for every charge against you. Convictions could result in even more problems down the road, even costing you your license itself.
It should not be surprising you would face a fine for violating a traffic law, such as maintaining financial responsibility, i.e. insurance coverage. A fine for such a charge can easily be $350-$400. Pretty stiff fine, right? More than one such charge is a lot more.
Driving while your license is invalid is a big no-no. You may be arrested for a first offense or ticketed. Beware, though, of the consequences of simply paying the fine. Paying the fine results in a conviction. The consequences of conviction further spiral out of control.
Upon conviction of driving while license invalid, your license automatically will be 1) re-suspended for the same amount of time your license was already suspended; and 2) you will incur another reinstatement fee. The cycle is insidious and traps many people in a hole so deep they may never be able to come up with enough money to regain their license.
Sometimes, the letters notifying people of a suspension don’t even reach the people, so they get to learn of the suspension when a cop informs them during a traffic stop months or years after the suspension began.
The moral of the story is to address your tickets in a timely manner WITH an attorney familiar with the traffic laws. If you try to do it yourself, you could save some money on the front end. However, as has been described here, you may wind up paying thousands more dollars and much more time trying to fix a problem you “handled” yourself.
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