What's the Big Deal?

I imagine people who weren't familiar with all the ramifications of this, they might say, hey, this is just a 20 dollar fine. Of course i'm not going to hire a lawyer to fight this. You know, they do the whole no contest or whatever it's called here. The next thing you know, they're looking at something that shows up on a background check, and can have serious repercussions - absolutely. I thinkthe the flip side of that coin is, if that was what we were doing in practice anyway, why not just codify right?