HOW TO WIN A CARELESS DRIVING TICKET
You were involved in a minor accident and unfortunately you were served with a ticket, A ticket for careless driving. Obviously, you’re alarmed. You don’t like that word, and I understand why. Your question then becomes how to win a careless driving ticket. I’m going to attempt to answer that for you as best I can.
I first must qualify what winning a careless driving ticket actually means. If you’re defending someone on a careless driving, the most important thing to keep in mind is we do not want you convicted of careless driving because of the consequences. So one could easily argue that the win would be getting you into some other minor offense. Probably and arguably the most important thing to be doing.
A full win is something different. You’re charged with careless driving. The ticket goes away. It’s withdrawn. It’s like it never happened. We are successful in doing that. We do that many times any given week. But I cannot tell you that it happens for every client that walks in the door.
It does happen with some frequency and we’re very proud to be able to do that. But that does not mean that if you didn’t lose, didn’t get your ticket withdrawn completely, that you didn’t win. Take for example, you’re charged with careless driving and we reviewed the disclosure, we found a loophole, we found a problem, we found the case that relates directly to what your mistake may have been. That mistake demonstrates to us in writing, in history of law that this is allowable and there should be no conviction. And we approached the prosecutor with that. We then approach the judge with that and everyone has agreed that; yes, you’ve been overcharged. No possible way of convicting you at all of careless, you’re actually more guilty of some minor offense that’s really not going to hurt you.
That also can be construed as a win. That is an absolute success when that happens. Many things go into getting a result like that, whether it’s completely withdrawn. Or whether or not it’s been reduced to something less. Usually if it’s reduced to something less, that really means that a client will be experiencing financial relief.
Your insurance company will not be some new multiple, you will not have to deal with a consequence of an employer who’s wondering whether they can have you drive any of their vehicles. To achieve that, any one of our staff have done this hundreds, even thousands of times, and that’s going to be, they’re going to review the disclosure, which is the actual evidence and case against you.
That disclosure is going to be compared to the case law. In particular, the case law that’s relevant to your specific set of facts, they’re gonna look for two things. They’re gonna look for the ones that relate as closely as possible to the set of facts that you come in with. They’re also gonna look for any cases that may be used against us by the prosecution.
The reason we want to know about those and find those is because we want to argue against those. We want to qualify our set of facts so that we can neutralize any attack from a prosecutor or a crown to distinguish: “No, that’s not accurate. That’s not right.” We put a shine on our own case and we highlight what really happened here, which mitigates and reduces what you’ve done, if anything, so that we can achieve that complete withdrawal. Achieve that complete dismissal, or reduce this to something that will not bother anyone in any way.