You are entitled to a vigorous defense against any criminal allegations. It is your right to full and vigorous defense against any and all criminal allegations. You should exercise that right vigorously and without compromise and you should not feel guilty for doing so. The law allows you to contest any traffic infraction entirely by mail. In this way you can contest your citation without appearing at all and, for reasons already discussed, will have a better chance of winning than at trial.
Further, if you lose your trial by declaration, you have 20 days to request a Trial de Novo new trial pursuant to CVC d. You then can appear in court for the first time for your second chance of winning. Most courtesy notices hardly mention or do not mention these rights at all. If they even mention the possibility of contesting a citation, they also mention that this generally requires two court appearances, one to plead not guilty, a second for the actual trial.
If you do appear in person to plead not guilty, most courts will make you enter your plea last, inconveniencing you to the maximum. Then it will ask you to return to court for a trial. The California Traffic Court System extorts over a billion dollars a year from California citizens by keeping us ignorant of our rights.
California traffic courts use the formality of the courthouse to further intimidate those brave enough to appear, scaring them into pleading guilty or accepting an assignment to attend traffic school.
However, in my experience, contesting by mail is essentially the same thing as mitigation. Mitigation is where you admit to having committed the infraction and ask the court to lower the fine. The only thing this saves you is a few bucks in initial costs. Speeding tickets and other moving violations still get reported to DOL and your insurance company. The main reason is that you cannot make legal motions to suppress evidence by mail. Ticket cases are almost always won by using the rules of evidence, court rules and the rules of infractions to keep evidence from being presented to the court.
Accepting it could lead to increased premiums and put you at risk of a license suspension. Before you go to court to fight your ticket, you should prepare your arguments. This involves researching the law on which your citation is based.
You should examine each detail of the traffic rule at issue, which may be very precise. Every element of the rule is critical, since the judge will need to find that all of them are satisfied before determining that you are guilty. In other words, you can get rid of the case by showing that the evidence does not support just one element of the rule. You should not worry that your argument is overly technical or nitpicky. The judge will take a detail-oriented approach to their legal analysis as well.
Many tickets have been defeated based on a very small nuance, even when the driver violated the main elements of a rule. Read more here about researching traffic laws.
Sometimes a driver violated the letter of the law but had a legitimate reason for doing so. Perhaps they were responding to a medical emergency or a sudden hazard that they could not have anticipated.
Check the ticket to find out whether a state, county or local officer issued it and search online for traffic procedures in that jurisdiction. Delay the hearing. This will give you more time to build your case. Gather evidence. Evidence could include dashcam video or GPS data from a smartphone app, or photographic evidence that a speed limit sign was obscured. Research speed equipment. Look up the method the officer used to clock your speed, note its weaknesses and prepare to present them.
Instruction manuals include maintenance schedules you can question the officer about, and they may note radar gun weaknesses, for example. Make witness arrangements. You can call in witnesses, including any passengers in the car when the ticket was issued. Plan your questions.
You can question the issuing officer, including about his or her memory and training with speed-clocking equipment. These lawyers typically specialize in DUIs and more serious cases, but some take speeding ticket cases.
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