HOW LONG DOES A SPEEDING TICKET STAY ON YOUR RECORD?

I’m often asked by clients many things, and I’m always happy to answer those questions for them. Another question that is quite common for me to have to answer is, how long does a speeding ticket stay on your record? It’s a very good question because there’s some facets to that that would be important to anyone who is facing a charge.

The Service Ontario record, and, ironically, the Service Ontario record is the same record that an insurance company has the ability to look in on if you’re trying to negotiate a new contract for automobile insurance. That record is, in fact, three years. So, what we need to be aware of in that venue is this, is that if you’ve got a ticket and it’s three years old, it will be falling off of your record completely.

Meaning that if the insurance company, or you looked… into your abstract, that abstract would not show anything over three years of age. All right. Now, if that violation had demerit points, okay, the demerit points would have disappeared after two years. So at two years, all demerit points from that particular offense are gone.

And in the third year, that violation from their records is gone. When you’re charged with an offense, the police use a computer system different than that. It does include all of that information. However, they are able to look at your whole driving history based on your driver’s license, which is something we have from birth.

We have our own driver’s license and they can look back at any time. Prosecutors who are going to be handling this sort of thing will order disclosure, same as we would when we’re defending someone. And they’re going to see, usually, a complete historical driving record for that client. In those cases, I have been able to successfully advocate that it’s only relevant within the last five years.

So if any clients have talked to me at this point in time, or any of my staff, you’re going to be asked questions like, One of the main questions that we hear around the firm is from us to a prospective client is, what does your driving record look like in the past five years? So that’s, supersedes what we know about Service Ontario and the insurance company, and it goes back far enough where it may be relevant to a prosecutor, and these are things that we need to consider in order to help defend any client that comes to our firm.

If you’re charged outside of five years, it’s in some cases, I recent cases, I’ve had clients that have been charged with some criminal driving behavior. That’s that’s outside of that five-year range. And the concern would become well, I don’t want this, you know, dangerous driving record being a part of this minor violation that happened now and we have consistently been successful on keeping that out of the way, not being considered in any sort of negotiations, and certainly not a part of any sentencing if that were to occur.