Solid Defenses Against Traffic Tickets

Before you decide to fight your ticket, you should learn about the charge against you and consider the possible ways to fight your ticket.  It may be easier than you think.  Ask yourself these questions.  If any of them apply to you, have a good chance of getting out of your ticket.

• Was the officer’s view of what occurred obstructed by other moving vehicles or stationary objects like trees, fences, or buildings? If so, this allows you to argue that the officer could not have clearly seen the alleged offense and gives you an opening to sell your version of events to the judge. 
• Did the officer stop the right car? It is quite possible in heavy traffic for an officer to see a violation committed by one white minivan (a 1995 Plymouth Voyager, for example) and to stop another (an almost identical white 1994 Dodge Caravan) farther down the road. Your ability to claim this happened (“the officer got the wrong driver, Your Honor”) obviously goes way up if you can show that because of a curve in the road, construction project, or just heavy traffic, the officer lost sight of the offending vehicle between the violation and pulling you over. 
• Were you charged with speeding when you were driving safely, even though you were driving over the speed limit? In about 20 states, the law says it’s legal to drive slightly over the posted speed limit as long as you can prove conditions made it safe to do so. 
• Was there an actual, provable error in the officer’s approach or methodology? In citing you for speeding, did the officer correctly pace your vehicle or properly use VASCAR, radar, or laser to establish your speed?
• Do any other legal defenses exist to the law you’re charged with violating? For example, if you were charged with driving too slowly in the left lane of a multilane highway, it is a legal defense (provided for in most state’s laws) that you were planning to turn left.

Defenses That Rarely Work

Face it, saying “I didn’t do it,” or “the officer’s lying,” without presenting any specifics to back up your contention is highly unlikely to result in your being found not guilty. Similarly, generalized statements about the possible inadequacies of radar or laser techniques almost never result in your beating a speeding ticket. Even if you successfully point out minor inaccuracies on your ticket, such as the officer mistaking the color, make, or model of your car when writing the ticket, you will rarely get off (assuming, of course, the officer appears in court and convincingly explains why your conduct was illegal).

Here is a laundry list of poor defenses:

• You claim you were honestly mistaken about the law (as opposed to a particular fact, as would be the case with a hidden stop sign). 
• You argue your violation didn’t harm anybody. The fact that your illegal conduct was not dangerous is not a winning defense, except when you are cited for speeding in states where it can be legal to exceed the posted speed. 
• “The officer was picking on me.” This is called “selective enforcement” and is often raised by a motorist who claims the ticketing officer ignored others who were also violating the law. To win with a “selective enforcement” defense, you have to take a huge additional step and show that the officer had a specific and improper motive to pick on you. 
• Tell a sympathetic story. The fact that your child, your mother, or your parakeet was ill will not get you off.

Taking a Gamble --  Maybe the Officer Won’t to Show Up

Suppose you decide you don’t have much of a defense. For example, you ran a stop sign right in front of an officer or were caught doing 90 mph on the freeway with a 65-mph limit by an officer who paced you for two miles. Obviously, the attractiveness of traffic school goes up as your chances of beating the ticket in court go down. But what should you do if you aren’t eligible for traffic school? Automatically pay the ticket? You can consider one other possibility— although it is often a long shot: The officer may not show up in court. In that case, in most states your ticket will probably be dismissed. But don’t count on this happening. It’s true that sometimes an officer misses a court appearance while on vacation, due to illness, a scheduling conflict, or other reasons, but officers commonly show up. And the more serious the violation, the more the odds increase of an officer’s appearance.

Excerpted and adapted from Beat Your Ticket: Go to Court & Win, by David W. Brown (Nolo).