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The Best Way To Fight Traffic Tickets
Last year I rear-ended a car while on a freeway in stop-and-go traffic; he had slammed on his brakes and I wasn’t able to stop in time. We hit bumper-to-bumper, and though the front of my car wasn’t damaged and neither was the back of his car, the impact pushed the front of his car into a truck and banged up his front end. The police were called and an accident report was filed, and eventually we all drove away. A few weeks later I received a letter in the mail from the State Patrol; in it was a traffic ticket for inattentive driving. Sure, I probably shouldn’t have hit the guy, but I wasn’t inattentive. I decided to fight it.
Fortunately, I learned that it wasn’t particularly difficult to fight traffic tickets. In fact, the ticket gave me the option to sign an admittance and pay my fee or to report to the specified county office to talk to a traffic officer to fight the ticket. I did a quick Google search and learned that inattentive driving was a strict liability offense, meaning that the trooper who cited me would have to prove that I was driving inattentively in order for the ticket to stick. Feeling pleased with myself, I went in to see the traffic officer but was told that I needed a police report in order to properly fight the ticket. That took another couple weeks to obtain, but eventually I returned. I showed up in a shirt and tie, with a few notes written down to allow me to argue the charge. The traffic officer looked over the police report, looked at the ticket, and then said “all right, the charge is dismissed.” After a few clicks on her keyboard I was free to go and free of the ticket and its $100 fine.
Though it wasn’t very tough for me, sometimes it’s a little tougher to fight traffic tickets. One of the reasons I had an easy time of it was because of the strict liability nature of my ticket. It’s not so easy to fight traffic tickets which aren’t in this category like speeding tickets. If the traffic officer wouldn’t have dismissed the ticket it would have been sent to traffic court, where I would have argued my case in front of a judge. Now, if the State Trooper wouldn’t have shown up I would have won automatically (though some states allow the State Patrol to send any agent, regardless of whether or not that particular trooper wrote the ticket. If this is the case my odds would have been pretty bad). If the trooper would have show up things probably wouldn’t have gone in my favor, as judges are usually likely to take a trooper’s word over someone else’s.
The best way to fight traffic tickets is to be respectful and to play by the rules; if you work within the system and appear to be fighting a ticket that was given unjustly you’ve got a chance, but if you’re belligerent or disrespectful you don’t have a chance.
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