Really!? By your own admission you have been charged and convicted of speeding on 4 occasions in addition to several more.
This would seem to indicate that you are indeed “generally a speeder”.
Exactly, the statute of limitations does not apply to your circumstances.
By opting not to appear for your court date, in effect, you entered a plea of guilty and you were convicted of speeding.
Cooperation and information sharing between municipal, state, federal, and even provincial law enforcement has improved to the point that I doubt whether you can dodge out-of-state traffic tickets at all.
You can bury your head in the sand but you can’t outrun the internet.
I live in Virginia. I don’t know how common this is in other states but it’s very common here. Cops will camp at the bottom of hills that have oddly low speed limits, or there’s places that have good hiding spots where the speed limit will oddly go 10 mph lower for a while seemingly just to catch people for speeding tickets. If you’re going to go more than about 5-7 mph over the speed limit, do yourself a favor and figure out where these kinds of spots are along any route you travel.
As someone else mentioned upthread, traffic violations are handled differently. If you don’t pay a fine, generally you get a grace period with an extra fee, and then your license is suspended. That you don’t have a Viriginia license doesn’t mean that they won’t suspend your driving privileges. In fact, chances are your driving privileges have been suspended in Virginia for a long time. That another intervening ticket since then didn’t bring it up doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the case, just that that cop either didn’t look very hard, didn’t care, or was doing you a favor.
I believe you have to have a Virginia Driver’s License within 30-60 days of moving to Virginia. If you don’t, I’m pretty sure it counts as driving without a license. So, that you may have gotten the ticket for a different reason, it may still well count as a driving without a license. I see you’re already planning on getting the new license, make sure you have it before your court date.
Yes, I’m not a lawyer, but I did once get a ticket for an expired license. I got my license renewed and showed up to court with my new license and they dropped the charges. So, my advice would be to see if you have any outstanding fines, the ticket itself and the points may be off your record, but the fine could still be there and the resulting suspension. If it’s there, pay it and make sure your privileges are in place and chances are they’ll drop the charge. However, you still probably want to consult a lawyer because of the complications of not having a VA license and the old ticket.
I’m not aware of any “statute of limitations” on driving license administrative suspensions. You didn’t pay the fine and court costs, and VA suspended your right to drive in their state. They should have communicated this administrative suspension to NC, who should’ve suspended your license for non-payment. In any case, VA (and every state) has the right to suspend your privilege to drive in their state even if you are legally still allowed to drive in another state. This is what they have done. And your privilege to drive will stay suspended or revoked until you pay up. Here’s some chapter and verse for you:
§ 46.2-395. Suspension of license for failure or refusal to pay fines or costs.
A. Any person, whether licensed by Virginia or not, who drives a motor vehicle on the highways in the Commonwealth shall thereby, as a condition of such driving, consent to pay all lawful fines, court costs, forfeitures, restitution, and penalties assessed against him for violations of the laws of the Commonwealth; of any county, city, or town; or of the United States. For the purpose of this section, such fines and costs shall be deemed to include any fee assessed by the court under the provisions of § 18.2-271.1 for entry by a person convicted of a violation of § 18.2-51.4 or 18.2-266 into an alcohol safety action program.
B. In addition to any penalty provided by law, when any person is convicted of any violation of the law of the Commonwealth or of the United States or of any valid local ordinance and fails or refuses to provide for immediate payment in full of any fine, costs, forfeitures, restitution, or penalty lawfully assessed against him, or fails to make deferred payments or installment payments as ordered by the court, the court shall forthwith suspend the person’s privilege to drive a motor vehicle on the highways in the Commonwealth. The driver’s license of the person shall continue suspended until the fine, costs, forfeiture, restitution, or penalty has been paid in full. However, if the defendant, after having his license suspended, pays the reinstatement fee to the Department of Motor Vehicles and enters into an agreement under § 19.2-354 that is acceptable to the court to make deferred payments or installment payments of unpaid fines, costs, forfeitures, restitution, or penalties as ordered by the court, the defendant’s driver’s license shall thereby be restored.** If the person has not obtained a license as provided in this chapter, or is a nonresident, the court may direct in the judgment of conviction that the person shall not drive any motor vehicle in Virginia for a period to coincide with the nonpayment of the amounts due.**
Because it’s an administrative suspension, it’ll sit there for years until you pay the original court costs and fine and then show proof that you have done so. You then get to pay a re-instatement fee.
Oh, and you can go to jail for six months in VA and pay a 1500 dollar fine for driving without a license, as well as having your car impounded for 90 days. So I’d knock off the cavalier attitude and go get your license immediately.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
ps: Bolded some parts to make it simpler for you to read, since you clearly need that assistance.
I live in VA, and one of my hobbies is turning on the radio scanner for background noise while going about various and sundry mindless task.
When the police pull someone over, they request the dispatch run the plates thru the state DMV (and it doesn’t have to be VA, they can access any state), and from the registration info, they request a check license based on the name and address. Then the cop gets out of the car. By the time he returns from chatting with the driver, the dispatcher has registration, want’s/warrants, license status, and driving record. Sometimes, they will have to check a different name, as the registered owner isn’t driving, but not often.
I have noticed that there are more suspended drivers on the road than I’m comfortable with. Seldom does a day go by that they don’t catch a couple. Yeah, selection bias and all that, but there are still quite a few out there.
There are several types of suspensions, with too many points being the most common. However, “failure to pay fine” comes up on a regular basis. The full transmission goes something along the line of ‘John Doe, valid out of NC, suspended in VA, failure to pay fine’. I suspect that that may be the case here, but IAMAL, so feel free to ignore.
The other main reason for suspension is ‘insurance monitoring’. VA requires you to have insurance, or pay a hefty fee. When you register a car, you swear you have insurance, or are paying the fee. The state checks up on this (I don’t know how), and will suspend your license if you lied about having insurance.
As far as DMV providing anything for the court case, yah, they do, sorta. With a suspended driver, the officer will ask the dispatcher to ‘put a certified copy of the record in my box’. So DMV doesn’t directly provide the driving record, but the police will pull the record and take it to the trial for use as needed. I suspect (but haven’t been to court to verify) that this won’t be the only copy of the driving record in the court if the case goes to trial.
I have a couple of friends who have learned the hard way that Virginia tends to revoke your privilege to drive in the state if you neglect to pay your fines.
Perhaps “the DMV” is a bit too specific. My thought is that proving the date a person moved is fairly difficult. There is no one document or database entry that conclusively proves exactly when a person moved.
When you walk into the DMV to get your new license, you could have been living in-state for 59 days, 65 days, 90 days 180 days, and the DMV people wouldn’t know.
You get pulled over with your NC license. How does the officer know you moved to Virginia? As far as they know, you still live in NC, and NC doesn’t have any way to say “Hey, that guy moved out of here 80 days ago!”
Do they care? Is the burden of proof on the court’s officers in traffic court (as opposed to, say, a murder rap), or would the judge just say “prove when you moved to Virginia, John Doe,” and leave it on you to produce employment records and a signed lease or closing statement from your current residence?
A classic claim in traffic court is “my speedometer was mis-calibrated! I had no idea I was going ten over!” It’s so common that cops have actually suggested to me, during a traffic stop, “Might want to get that thing calibrated,” with a little smile. Yet I do not recall hearing about the state seizing and testing someone’s speedometer, while I have heard of people paying their own money to have an auto mechanic test their speedometer, exactly as if the burden of proof is on them to establish mis-calibration, not the state.
Apples and oranges. The state has no call to check speedo calibration. The state has evidence the driver was exceeding the speed limit through other means (radar, LIDAR, clocking). If the driver wants to offer a miscalibrated speedo as a defense (really just changing the charge from speeding to having defective equipment), then it’s up to him to present the exculpatory evidence.
IANAL, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. OTOH, if you ever get pulled over in that state again you’re going to jail (maybe for a short time until you pay the fines, but it’s hardly worth trying to run out on a traffic ticket).
There is the issue date on the vehicle registration. Generally you don’t register private vehicles in states where you don’t live.
I personally straddled two states for a couple years. I owned property and had vehicles registered in both states. I could only hold a DL in one state. In that time, I was pulled over twice in the state where I had no DL, but was driving a vehicle registered in that state (broken tail light and registration sticker hadn’t been put on the plate because of extreme cold temps - it was in the glove box).
They had no problem with my out of state DL. I was expecting to have to drag down documents to prove I was in a transition period on the registration sticker because I’d gotten that at the very last minute. But all the cop said was find a garage to pull into and get the sticker on the plate. But, that incident made it pretty obvious that the truck had been registered in the state for more than a year.
VA may be different, but I really don’t think that “lived here more than 60 days” is the same as driving without a license.
