AUBURN — The DeKalb County Prosecutor’s office wants 42 different trials to handle pending tickets filed against the CSX railroad for allegedly blocking railroad crossings.
Monday, Deputy Prosecutor Erik Weber requested the multiple trials during a pretrial hearing in DeKalb Superior Court I involving 42 pending tickets issued to the railroad. All the tickets are infractions and were filed between October 2014 and February 2015.
“We’d like to try all these cases individually,” Weber told Judge Kevin Wallace. “We’re asking for 42 different trials.”
CSX attorney Sarah Snoeberger said the railroad has not been served with at least 21 of the tickets. Wallace said it would not be a problem for the court to provide her with copies of the tickets.
Snoeberger said another issue relates to tickets the railroad believes are duplicates. She said such tickets are issued by an officer every 1o minutes while a train is stopped. She said DeKalb County is the only jurisdiction in the state to issue multiple separate tickets relating to one train in one alleged stop. She said CSX will file a motion to dismiss what it believes are duplicate tickets.
Wallace divided the cases into three groups, each containing eight tickets, and two more groups, each containing nine tickets. He scheduled bench trials for the groups of cases for Jan 26, Feb. 2, Feb. 9, Feb. 16 and Feb. 23, 2016. Depending on the outcome of motions to dismiss or the duplication of tickets, the distribution of the cases may change, Wallace added.
He scheduled a final pre-trial conference on all the cases for Dec. 4.
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