Beating traffic tickets

I received this in my email today, so I am not responsible for the information. Just felt like sharing.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU GET A TRAFFIC TICKET​

(not a joke)

This system has been tried and it works in every state. If you get a
speeding ticket or went through a red light or whatever the case may be, and you're going to get points on your license, this is a methodto insure that you DO NOT get the points. When you get your fine, send in a check to pay for it. If the fine is $79.00 make the check out for $82.00 or some small amount over the fine. The system will then have to send you back a check for the difference, however here is the trick.

DO NOT CASH THE REFUND CHECK! Throw it away! Points are not assessed to your license until all financial transactions are complete. If you do not cash the check, then the transactions are NOT complete. The system has received it's money and is satisfied and will no longer bother you. This information comes from an unmentionable computer company that sets up the standard databases used by every state.

I have to think that they might keep sending back the refund check by law, and eventually I'm going to cash it by mistake.

Please comment! And share your story about getting out of traffic tickets!

How about DON"T BREAK THE LAW as a method for not getting a traffic ticket. Just as a side note, the above advice would not work in my city since actual people handle the tickets and place your info into the computer.

too bad i just sent in a not guilty plea for running a red light. i'd have tried it. what have to lose!

This is one of those urban myths. It has been around for a very long time. Unfortunately, no one are able to prove this method works.

Actually, you should read this
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/t/tickets.htm

Breakin the Law,, Breakin the Law...

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:Cw9msXuWR7FSmM:http://vivian7rose.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/beavis_and_butthead_headbanging.gif

Here's another link to it on snopes.com...
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/ticket.asp

JM-99

helios said:

How about DON"T BREAK THE LAW as a method for not getting a traffic ticket.

Click to expand...

Doesn't always work. I've known people who have received tickets for running red lights or speeding but were obeying the law. Sometimes you're unlucky enough to come across a cop who hasn't met his/her daily quota and they ring you up for something you didn't do. In court it's your word against the cop's. Who do you think the judge will believe?

And no, the method mentioned in the first post will not work. Quite a few places won't even accept checks for payment of fines, only cash.

not all tickets are fair...

why don't you show up and fight it the old fashion way?
just don't go in unprepared...

recently I got a ticket going 50mph in a 25mph zone. area was two blocks long just off highway with a speed limit of 75mph with no warning of upcoming speed zone.

carefully measured off area and made drawing to document my case.
showed up on time. well come to find out the deputy that wrote ticket did not show up. so my ticket was dropped.

if you speak with DA, there's a good chance DA will drop case in return for you paying court costs. you will not save any funds, but will keep points off your record...

jtr1962 said:

Doesn't always work. I've known people who have received tickets for running red lights or speeding but were obeying the law. Sometimes you're unlucky enough to come across a cop who hasn't met his/her daily quota and they ring you up for something you didn't do. In court it's your word against the cop's. Who do you think the judge will believe?

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I got lucky, once - I was cited for "following too closely" ... in the middle of a stop-and-go freeway traffic jam!

This was while I was at college, and they didn't bother to tell the out of state students that by law, we had to re-register our cars and get California driver's licenses - unless we left the state every 20 days. I grew up in Oregon, where there was an exemption for students and absent other info, I figured it must work the same in California.

So, as soon as I got my citation, I went and started the process of re-registering my car, getting a California DL and challenging the "following too closely."

I got lucky, because the CHP officer failed to appear. I showed the judge the DMV paperwork and the brochure from my college about cars on campus - and told him about the law where I came from and the reasonable assumption I'd drawn that California worked the same way.

Since I'd already taken steps to fix the registration and DL, he waived the ENTIRE ticket - and suggested I chew someone's ear at my college about the brochure that failed to mention certain requirements of state law.

There are folks beating tickets by the officer's mistake of not wearing his hat, got me once!

I showed up in court, Atty asked me if I had worn my hat, and of course I said no....case dismissed

So next time you get pulled over ask him where his hat is, and tell him you beat him already.:huh:


Mods....forgive me

IBTL

ohiocopper said:

There are folks beating tickets by the officer's mistake of not wearing his hat, got me once!

I showed up in court, Atty asked me if I had worn my hat, and of course I said no....case dismissed

So next time you get pulled over ask him where his hat is, and tell him you beat him already.:huh:


Mods....forgive me

IBTL

Click to expand...

I don't quite understand. Is it the law that an officer must wear a hat? If so, why? Jim

Wow...there's a lot of misinformation in this thread...

Due to my profession, I will not give out any tips on beating a traffic ticket, other than to say:

--Quotas are a myth, and are illegal (at least in California).
--Dont want a ticket? Obey the law.
--It is your right to challenge the ticket in court. It's also the Court's right to issue an arrest warrant if you fail to show. As an Officer who wrote the ticket, if I fail to show, I'm disciplined by my Dept with a one day suspension, unpaid.
--If you fight the ticket, go to court prepared. Don't try to fight the ticket with "what if" scenarios, or attack the Officer's uniform, or patrol vehicle's cleanliness (all true stories, and are pretty common).
--If you lose in Court, your insurance will go up. If you plead guilty, your insurance, usually, is not affected (not sure why this is, and it isn't fool-proof).

-dan

for being out of uniform perhaps?

no quotas - but there are "stats"...
shift Sgt on up ask about how many citations been written for shift, week, month etc (ie. what yah been doin all day!)


had one sgt who'd answer quota complaints from citizens with a - "6 more tickets this month and I get a toaster oven" :huh:

Ahhh ok I confess...The hat thing is a joke

Take what Dano said and trust it.

Hmmm... I live in Florida and have seen a book of a friend of mines step dad, who is a lawyer, that said Florida Highway Patrol officer MUST be in FULL uniforn when performing a traffic stop. Hat and all... Now this WAS in 1997... or 1998... Gettin up there now... It may be different now. I think the entry I read stated an FHP pulled someone over and plain as day, from his dash cam you could see he did not have his hat on, ticket dismissed. Again this was a while ago and thing could be different. I hear Florida is a little strict about certain things. After I typed the rest of this, I searched a little and found a statment in the "FHP Policy Manual" that is vauge at best... It states "
When wearing the Class A or Class B uniforms, the campaign hat, cord and strap shall be worn when outside the patrol vehicle. The hat shall be positioned straight away and not tipped.

"
This must be true I found it on the internet... :lolsign:

I also heard of a book, 101 ways to get off on a speeding ticket. I did NOT read this book, it was just mentioned on the radio and the author did an interview, so I am repeating what I heard... 4 or 5 years ago. One of the ways is to schedule a court date, and then call in with a VERY creditable excuse, try not to lie, job interview, doctors appointment, something you can't change, also reschedule with in a few days of your case. The officer will schedule that day off but you rescheduled. From what the books says, the officer will not waste another day off for your case, for whatever reason, and when the officer doesn't show up... your off. The second way I remember from the interview, for a speedign ticket, was to request as much information about the officer, his car, and his equipment in his car, radar gun certification was the main one. This information should be public record. A good majority of the time, at least back then, the officer themself must keep up with their equipment's certifications and thier certifications with that equipment. The author said most of the time you can find a descrepancy between radar certifications which will void the speeding ticket.

Now, before I get blasted... I heard this on the radio and wanted to share for conversation sake... If anyone has read the "? for LEO" thread about doing the speed limit or staying with the flow, you know I speed, a little... If I were to get a ticket, and I was speeding... I would suck it up and pay my dues... I'm honest with myself and am not egotisitcal enough to think I need to work the system to avoid paying for something I KNOW I did. I also have NO idea if the above works. If anyone tries either of the two methods above I would REALLY love to hear the results.

Since we have some officers reading this, I have been dying to ask.... First, I try very hard to maintain "assured clear distance ahead." Here is the problem. The very minute I'm at a safe distance behind a vehicle, someone jumps in front of me. Yes, I back off again, and the same thing happens ad-nauseum. Before you know it, I might as well be in reverse (lol). Jim

dano said:

Wow...there's a lot of misinformation in this thread...

Due to my profession, I will not give out any tips on beating a traffic ticket, other than to say:

--Quotas are a myth, and are illegal (at least in California).
--Dont want a ticket? Obey the law.
--It is your right to challenge the ticket in court. It's also the Court's right to issue an arrest warrant if you fail to show. As an Officer who wrote the ticket, if I fail to show, I'm disciplined by my Dept with a one day suspension, unpaid.
--If you fight the ticket, go to court prepared. Don't try to fight the ticket with "what if" scenarios, or attack the Officer's uniform, or patrol vehicle's cleanliness (all true stories, and are pretty common).
--If you lose in Court, your insurance will go up. If you plead guilty, your insurance, usually, is not affected (not sure why this is, and it isn't fool-proof).

-dan

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...

Talk about misinformation.

Insurance companies absolutely do not care if you plead guilty or lose in court. I know of individual cases where points never made it onto a policy, sometimes it's a computer error, and other times it's an intentional act by an agent.

It is actually very easy to beat most tickets (generally speaking). All you have to do is hire an attorney for a couple hundred bucks.

In fact, it is so frigg'n easy to beat tickets in Washington that they had to change the rules. In other words, the state and various municipalities were losing so much money that they had to change the rules.

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsour...ckets02e&date=20060601&query=speeding+tickets

Drivers fighting tickets — and winning

By Jim Davis

"Joseph Ayala got the first speeding ticket seven years ago. Instead of paying it, Ayala took the advice of his boss and hired a lawyer. The lawyer, Jeannie Mucklestone, got the ticket dismissed. And Ayala has turned to her ever since.

"Jeannie's probably gotten me out of five tickets," said Ayala, a software developer who lives in Sammamish. "The last thing that I would want is five speeding tickets on my record."

More people in Washington are fighting — and beating — traffic tickets than ever before. More than 158,000 traffic charges were dismissed last year, twice as many as a decade ago..."

Sure, in some places 'quotas' may be against department policy, or local laws... but in reality that can be meaningless. If a Chief or Sergeant says "go write 15 tickets today for speeding" what the heck is a patrolman going to do?

http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=5&id=28018
"Two veteran Oklahoma City police officers alleged in a lawsuit Tuesday they have been forced to operate under an illegal quota system.

Officers are required to write 20 traffic tickets each month if not operating with a radar, and 25 tickets if they have radar, according to the lawsuit.

If you're in a situation where you haven't met your quota you're going to be subjected to discipline, said Mike Gassaway, the plaintiffs? attorney. It creates a predatory system"

http://www.nbc6.net/nbc6investigates/3295559/detail.html

"Come here driver!" a Hialeah police officer said as a driver sped by. What I did is that I gave you two tickets," another officer said as he was writing a ticket.

And hunt is exactly what Hialeah Police Chief Rolando Bolanos wants them to do.

"Absolutely, unequivocally we want them to hunt," Bolanos said. "Be aggressive be assertive, be attentive. Hunt for them!"

But according to a dozen Hialeah police officers we spoke wth, this aggressive policy is actually a quota they have to fulfill -- or else.

"They require that officers come in with certain citations a month. If those officers do not produce there is disciplinary action," a Hialeah police officer who did not want to be identified told NBC 6."

http://www.sptimes.com/News/052500/Hillsborough/When_a_quota_is_not_a.shtml

"A ticket a day keeps the sergeant away. Or so the old cop saying goes.

Cops don't like writing 'em. Everyone else hates getting 'em.

The only people who get happy about speeding tickets are police brass. Supervisors can rest assured that when patrol officers issue lots of tickets, they're clearly doing more out there than catching catnaps in their patrol cars.

So police weren't smiling several months ago when an official at the Tampa Police Department's westside district distributed a hand-written document that showed that, on average, officers issued 10.3 moving violations per month in 1999.

Some officers felt distributing the numbers was an unspoken threat: Make that monthly ticket average. Or else.

The problem is, requiring officers to write a minimal number of tickets starts to sound like a quota."

And the only thing the public seems to hate more than tickets is the idea that some cop just hit them up for $100 plus because he has to please his sergeant.

Consequently, the word "quota" at the Police Department is an epithet."

And so they just change the name from "quota" to "emphasis patrol"... problem solved! Remember "click it or stick it!" It's not a quota, just an emphasis patrol

dano said:

--Quotas are a myth, and are illegal (at least in California).

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Perhaps, but the system used by superiors for evaluating officers is usually based on number of arrests, tickets, or some other tangible measure. There may not technically be quotas, but the system in place is a defacto quota. For this and other reasons the courts and jails are full of people who didn't commit the crime they were charged with. I don't even really blame the officers for writing false tickets to satisfy some performance measure. Rather, I blame their superiors for putting a dumb system like that in place which dilutes the image of all LEOs in the public eye.

It is your right to challenge the ticket in court. It's also the Court's right to issue an arrest warrant if you fail to show. As an Officer who wrote the ticket, if I fail to show, I'm disciplined by my Dept with a one day suspension, unpaid.

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Are these things always true? The reason I ask is the one and only time I was ever in court was in 1999 when I received a summons for cycling on the sidewalk (probably the dumbest law in the universe but that's another topic entirely). I came to court on my appointed day. I plead not guilty but the officer didn't show. The case wasn't dismissed. I was given another court date. During the break I asked the Court Officer how many more times I would have to come to court before it would finally be thrown out. He said at least two more times. Since I didn't feel like coming back to court two more times he put me on the court calender right after the break and I changed my plea to guilty. The judge seemed annoyed that I changed my plea and I think he may have fined me an extra $50 since the court officer had said the usual fine for my "offense" was only $25 but I was fined $75. I was thoroughly annoyed that nobody told me what the fine would have been when I first plead, or what the typical procedure was if you plead not guilty. I probably just would have plead guilty from the start to get it over with, taken the $25 fine, and then sent a bunch of letters to my representatives complaining about this particular law.

It seems to me that the cards are stacked against the average person in court due to the lack of information provided. And why must you go to court at all if you intend to plead guilty? Why can't you just mail a stub on your summons back along with your payment? Seems everyone would save a lot of time that way.

If you lose in Court, your insurance will go up. If you plead guilty, your insurance, usually, is not affected (not sure why this is, and it isn't fool-proof).

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Just out of curiosity, if you plead guilty from the start will the fine typically be less than if you plead not guilty and lose your case? And why isn't the defendant told exactly what the fines will be in each case so that they can better decide what to do?