After you’ve gotten an attorney and decided that this is something you want to fight in court, it is time to prepare. To do this, I often ask my clients to reconstruct the event. How?
If the client is a local, I might ask them to perform a series of tasks to recreate their traffic stop.
You might consider the following steps if you are looking to fight a traffic ticket in any state…
- Go back to the street that you were on,
- Record yourself driving as you were on the day of your stop,
- Show me where you were stopped by law enforcement,
- Explain what the traffic conditions were like,
- Give a detailed account of your interaction with law enforcement…
Then, you can have a play-by-play recreation of the events of your traffic violation.
What Happens When You Fight Your Charge In Court?
In the courtroom, you don’t have to do anything. You’ll just sit by and let the lawyer try the case.
If the case goes to trial, I will subpoena the dash-cam, the body camera, and the officer’s notes.
(Maybe 15% of the time, officers will have written an incident report for a speeding ticket. Most of the time officers don’t write a report for these cases, but I will subpoena that information just in case it is there.)
Then, I advise my client: “Hey, we’re going to try your case. We told the DA we’re pleading not guilty. So, we may get our case tried today, or it may not get tried today.”
Here’s how it works…
In court, the mornings are spent for people that want to plead guilty: either pleading guilty straightforwardly or pleading guilty after they’ve negotiated a plea bargain in the case.
The afternoon session of court is for trials…
Depending on the severity of the case, you need to be aware that your case may not be resolved immediately. You’re likely to have to come to court several times before you can get your ticket tried.
The Strategy Behind Speeding Ticket Success
It is very difficult to win speeding tickets at trial. Consider that an officer charges you with going 70 in a 55. At trial, it wouldn’t work to argue something like, “I wasn’t going that fast. I couldn’t have been going more than 60 – and I wasn’t going 70.”
Why doesn’t this work? Because a speed of 60 is still illegal in a 55-mile-an-hour zone. So how do you even beat these cases? You beat the case by attacking the procedure.
For example, what if the officer clocks you on a radar gun?
To beat a speeding ticket, we first have to establish that they didn’t follow the proper procedure with the radar. How?
Officers have to maintenance their radar guns before and after every enforcement action. So, when they clock someone on the radar, they’re supposed to re-tune that radar gun before they use it to stop another driver.
I’ve beaten these speeding ticket cases because the officer could not testify under oath that he did the maintenance between and before every enforcement action using their radar.
So remember: you cannot beat them on speed, you have to beat them on the procedure, on the maintenance of the equipment, on the equipment that they’re using.
For more information on Traffic Violations In North Carolina, an initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (252) 572-4495 today.
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