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Traffic court: It’s where you swear to tell nothing but the truth — unless you’d like to weasel out of a speeding ticket by pleading guilty to a parking violation in a town where you’ve never actually parked.

Sounds absurd, but this theater plays out every day, and it’s undermining trust in our legal system.

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Recently I was in a New York municipal court alongside a dozen other people for a speeding ticket pretrial conference. I didn’t disagree that I had been driving 81 mph on the Northway, but I thought it was justifiable to get around a 70-foot-long semi stacked 13 feet high with tens of thousands of pounds of logs.

At the pretrial conference in Chester, Warren County, the prosecutor called each of us up to the bench and offered to exchange our speeding tickets for a minor parking violation. The first two people, both from out of state, quickly accepted the plea bargain, paid the clerk about $200, and moved on with their day. Then my name was called.

“What alternatives do I have?” I asked.

“Go to trial,” Justice James P. McDermott responded, according to the official court recording.

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“But the parking ticket is the best offer we’re going to make,” said the assistant district attorney, Robert McCarty. “It’s as low as we can go.”

“It seems odd that I'm exchanging what you're saying I did for something I definitely didn't do,” I said.

“It’s called a reduction,” McDermott said.

The difference between “reduction” and “lie” was lost on me, however. This back-and-forth went on for 10 increasingly awkward minutes as I questioned how pleading guilty to a made-up parking ticket was in any way in service of truth and justice, to the rising annoyance of the judge, prosecutor and seemingly everyone else. One man threw up his arms and guffawed so loudly........

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