Ask this judge.
From News of the Weird.
In Alberta, there are no extra costs incurred for fighting a ticket, except the time it takes you to get a hearing date.
I’d show up early and speak to the prosecuter, and more often then not he would offer to reduce the demerit points or reduce the fine if I had a good argument.
Once, I went to a trial over a “stunting” ticket. The cop was behind me at a stop sign “T” intersection with his high beams on, sitting in an unmarked car.
I was distracted and popped the clutch causing my tires to chirp for half a second. The cop had nothing else to ticket me for, so the goof wrote me up for “stunting”.
The prosecutor refused to throw it out so we went to trial. The cop took the stand and said that I had done a “burnout” from the stop sign.
I then got to cross examine him. In a full courtroom of traffic violators, I did my best lawyer act.
meek: Officer, where was your car in relation to my car?
Cop: Directly behind you about ten feet.
meek: Did you see any smoke come off the tires?
Cop: No, I didn’t see any smoke.
meek: Did I leave black tire marks on the road?
Cop: It was dark and I didn’t look for any, but I would guess that marks were made on the street…
meek: Well did you actually see my back tires spin as I left the stop sign?
Cop: Yes, I saw the back tires spin.
meek: Your honor… I drive a car with front wheel drive, my back tires can’t spin.
Judge: You can go now sir, this ticket is withdrawn.
As I was walking out of the chuckling courtroom with a big smile, the cop walked by and said, “Nice Job”.
The judge added, “Every now and then someone gets lucky on one of these…”
Ahhhhhhh… Sweet redemption.
.
I suppose I should tell my “fight the ticket” stories:
There’s a town near where I live called Post. Post is a wide spot in the road, really nothing more than a place you drive through on the way to somewhere else. As such, they’re a notorious speed trap (small towns gotta make their money somewhere, right?). I got ticketed for 78 in a 70. In truth, I think he pulled me over preferentially (everyone was going the same speed) because I still had my out-of-state license plates. Little did he know, I lived a short distance away, close enough to fight the ticket.
So, I went to my first court hearing, pled not guilty, and asked for a continuance from the first date they set because, I said truthfully, our fiscal year was ending at work and it wasn’t possible to get the time off. They said they’d mail me when I was reset. A year later, I get a letter with the new date, shortly followed by another letter stating that the officer couldn’t make the court date, so my ticket was dismissed. Well, that was easy.
Another one, I was helping out a friend: she was driving to work one morning, on a route that passes through a school zone. The zone is marked by signs with flashing lights that say “Speed Limit 30 when flashing”. Just before the school zone, there are signs that set the speed limit at 40. When she approached, she saw the officer sitting on a side street within the school zone, noticed that the lights weren’t flashing, and didn’t bother to slow down, since she was only going 38. The cop pulled her over anyway, and he wrote her a ticket for 38 in a 30.
So, to help her out, I contacted the city traffic engineers. They faxed me a list of all the school zones in the city and the times the lights on the signs started and stopped flashing. And what do you know, the time they stopped flashing for that zone was the exact time the officer had written on the ticket. The cop couldn’t have seen that they’d stopped, since he was within the zone, meaning that the signs were both facing away from him. We also took pictures of all the signs and made a little diagram.
Armed with that, we went to the courthouse. After a long speech from the judge, we got to talk to the prosecutor privately. When we showed him what we had, he said, “Yeah, I don’t think I can win this one,” and did a dismissal on the spot. Score!
And if he’s a State Trooper, refer to him as “Trooper”, instead of “Officer”.
Once as a vendor in a North Wildwood Irish Festival I was permitted to park in a restricted area, but the guy who hands out the actual permits was late getting around to me.
I contested the ticket for that reason and pleaded “not guilty by affidavit” and was aquitted.
I once got a city parking ticket in the mail for an address I had never stopped anywhere near at a time I was at work elsewhere. I phoned the traffic division and the clerk told me to make a notarized statement to that effect and send it in. I did and that was the end of it.
When I was a senior in HS, I got my first ticket because I made a left turn at 8:45 AM at an intersection that had posted “no left turn 7AM-9AM”. I went to court in a suit accompanied by my mother, not necessarily to contest the ticket, but hoping that the judge might let the first offense go. It turned out there was something about the ticket I hadn’t noticed: the officer had not written in the TIME of the offense. That being essential to the infraction, the ticket was dismissed. At the time I thought the officer had just made a mistake (lucky for me). Years later I began to think he might have done that deliberately to give me a break.
Eh, if he really wanted to give you a break why would he have bothered pulling you over at all? (or, he could have pulled you over and simply warned you rather than writing you a ticket and making you go to court)
Probably just forgot.
Sorry to bring up a rather pointed question, but has anyone noticed a difference in rate of success of appeals based on race? Since the process is based on the judgment of one person, it would seem that discrimination is much easier.
Parking tickets are also not unbeatable, as you discovered. The ones that spring to mind were from when I was in college: once, I got a ticket for parking in a space for which I had a valid permit. Thing was, they had just changed the permits from windshield stickers to rearview mirror hangers, and although my hanger was up, I hadn’t removed last year’s sticker from my window (stupid piddling rule). I wrote a letter arguing that the rule regarding removal of the stickers was to help parking enforcement avoid confusion with stickers from previous years, and, since they had switched to hangers and no longer used stickers, my failure to remove the sticker did not frustrate the purpose of the rule. They dismissed the ticket.
One other fun one: when I got my financial aid check, it had a list of deductions, and among them were two parking tickets. I knew I’d had no parking tickets, so I called the ticket office. They said, “Do you drive a silver (some compact car I don’t remember)?” No, I said, but now I know what happened. Back in December, my truck was hit by two other cars. The at-fault person’s insurance paid for a rental car while my truck was in the shop. That rental car was the little silver compact. And, because I wanted to park where I’d paid to park during final exams (yeah, that was a fun week), I had gotten a temporary permit from the parking office. So, they connected my December parking permit of this car with two tickets issued back in September, probably to some yutz who didn’t think he’d ever get caught since it wasn’t his car.
I gave them the name of the car rental place so that they could verify my story and get the name of the person who had been using that car when the tickets were issued. Shortly thereafter, they sent me a check for the amount deducted for the tickets. I can only imagine the look on the guy’s face when those parking tickets came back to haunt him…heheh
In didn’t notice it in my situation. The court guy (who was white) seemed more interested in getting me out the door. Fine by me, I was parked at a meter.