I’m an international student studying in the Midwest (Wisconsin). I was recently cited for a traffic offense – failing to stop/yield – and appeared in court recently to explain myself.
More details in the comments below. I’m doing some review and would like to know what I could have done differently.
7 comments
Hi all. I was recently cited for failing to stop/yield at an intersection. I’m not sure if it matters, but it’s a small intersection with a speed limit of 25. And I appeared in court and pleaded no contest. I explained how I come from a country that drives on the opposite side of the road and that I stopped, signaled, but didn’t yield properly. The judge reduced it to a “yellow light” offense and reduced the fine by $20 (from $180 to $160) and the demerit points by 1 (from 4 to 3). These are the facts of the case and what I did in traffic court.
My thoughts which I did not communicate to the court: that intersection is poorly designed and it’s hard to see oncoming traffic which is why I inched out and out and when I saw a gap I made a judgment call to turn. I think the police know this, which is why they’re almost permanently camped beside that intersection in an attempt to “raise revenue”. I’m not saying I’m free of fault but seeing that it’s my first offense, in a small intersection with a low speed limit, and that there was no bodily injury or property damage, I wish I could have been cut some slack. I’m already stretched thin paying for my tuition with my savings but now my auto insurance premiums are going to go up unnecessarily.
Personally, I was actually hoping for a dismissal. So I’m just wondering if there’s anything I could have communicated better to the judge or done differently to better my chances of a dismissal?
You never know what kind of judge you’re going to end up with. Stop sign/light offenses will rarely go in your favor in my experience.
Hire a cheap lawyer, it’s only $50 in Missouri to get these reduced to a non-moving violation so you don’t get any points on your license.
Unsure which state you are in and if that option is available or not but it works well where it does.
Hire a traffic lawyer. For better or worse, they are often able to get tickets dismissed on technicalities without ever even having to argue the facts of the incident. If that fails, it sounds like there were enough mitigating circumstances and questionable intersection design that they would likely have been able to get your ticket reduced more or dropped. Their fees often cost more than the ticket you’re fighting though, so you’d have to determine whether the long term benefits of getting the ticket dropped are worth it. In many cases they don’t require you to be present in court either, so you don’t have to miss work, etc.
You may have gotten some “junk mail” from a traffic lawyer, charging ~$50-100 to appear in court for you (or you can find one online or a billboard by a major highway… they often do DUI shit as well, but for a lot more money). It’s generally worth it; just not having to take time off work or school is often worth the money, and the lawyer is more likely than you are to get your ticket reduced or dropped, because they know what they’re doing. I’m less sure on this but they also *might* not charge you if they lose.
Both me and my dad have done so and it been worth it; he got a speeding ticket half a state away (so would have taken a whole day off work to show up in court), and I got a ‘fix-it’ for expired registration (luckily local so would ‘only’ have lost half a day). In both cases we didn’t have to show up to court, and the ticket was dismissed; cheaper and no license points.
Regarding the specifics of your stop, you should come to a complete stop *before* the stop sign, *then* in forward for visibility. If cops are being assholes for revenue generation, there’s not much you can do, but the aforementioned is how you be ‘fully compliant’. If you do that and still get a ticket, and are in asshole/quota/money-making territory, you’d *still* need a real lawyer who knows how to argue “this intersection needs to be fixed, not camped”, and you’re still likely to have to pay the fine, you just might be able to git things fixed so that it doesn’t happen anymore.
In general, most of us just pay these tickets and move on.
Honestly, you appearing in court, getting a $20 reduction (But was the 1-3 hours you spent in court worth $20 of your time) and a lowering of the points was a best possible scenario. Most people if they appear in traffic court for a totally valid ticket will get stuck with the original fee + court costs.
If it is a poorly designed intersection or not is something you would take up with the local or state government who designed the road, not the traffic court judge or the law enforcement officer who wrote the ticket.
No matter what the offense, here’s how traffic court works: you show up, wait to talk to the prosecutor, they look at your docket and they reduce the charge to a less severe penalty, for the simple virtue of you showing up. Whatever they decide though, you’re on the hook for – fines, points, and court fees. But if it’s a point offense, going to traffic court will almost always save you money, rather than just paying the ticket online.
You could have brought a lawyer and they could have argued the charge down further. But without a lawyer a dismissal is nearly impossible, and at that point you probably aren’t saving any money.