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Defense Strategies

Many traffic ticket defense strategies only waste your time. This is because we get bad advice. In this article, we will discuss some common mistakes that only waste your time, the court’s time, and make judges mad at you. These mistakes should be avoided.

Traffic Ticket Legal Research

You can waste a great deal of time by reading a lot of law books and doing a lot of research. This is a total waste of time. You will educate yourself on the intricacies of the law, but it will not help you fight your traffic ticket.

Postponing the Trial

Many recommend postponing the court trial. This may have worked in the past, but these days it doesn’t. The courts are becoming very efficient and delaying the court trial will do nothing except to make the judge and the court clerk mad. The main reason postponing the trial helps is that the officer will lose track of the time and won’t show up. This is essentially ineffective now because most officers appear in the same court on a certain day of the month. When you get a ticket, the trial date is decided by the officer who writes the ticket and you are to appear on that day. If you delay it, the court clerk knows when to reschedule the trial, which is the next day that office is in court. So, there is little chance you can delay the trial date and the officer actually does not show up. Having said this, please note that just because you postpone the trial, it doesn’t mean the officer will show up. So, always try to go to court. It is possible the officer will not show up.

Be Prepared

This is a devastating mistake! Most people go to the court without doing any preparation or having done little preparation, which is fruitless. Thus, make sure that you are fully prepared to show up at court; otherwise, you will blow it off. Once again, the best thing you can do is to show up to court. Many times the officer does not show up and you win. When you do show up, please be prepared. Be calm and collected. This is not a murder trial. Even if you lose, all you have to do is to pay a fee. It is just a traffic ticket and every day hundreds of people are charged with it. The best part to remember is that the traffic courts feature a friendly environment, so you don’t need to be scared.

Asking for Prosecutions Evidence

This is a tough one. Do you want to ask or not ask for the prosecution’s evidence? You can for example ask for evidence of how many tickets the officer wrote that day. You will try to prove at trial that this officer just sits around and only writes traffic tickets. But if that is your only evidence, you will lose. It is irrelevant if an officer spends all day long writing tickets. The only issue is if you were speeding. One reason for not asking for evidence is that when the evidence is requested before the trial, the prosecution knows you are about to fight a ticket and they come prepared to beat you. It is then likely they will beat you. The best thing to do is to go to court without calling the court or requesting a trial. Just go to court. While you will be preparing yourself in the best way, the prosecutor would be expecting another unprepared and ignorant person on the other side. This is what will help you. Thinking all this, the prosecutor will not prepare the case as may be required and you can win.