How to Fight Speeding Tickets

Contesting Speeding Tickets

You obey the law. You don’t drink and drive, you’ve never stolen anything, and as uncomfortable as it is, you buckle your seat belt every time you fire up your engine whether you’re driving your personal vehicle or your semi-truck. But then one day it happens—you see flashing red and blue behind you, and you pull to the side of the road.

Sometimes, it seems like law enforcement officers target commercial drivers, and, in some cases, this is a legitimate action. Drivers with CDLs are supposed to be just that—professional drivers. Of course, they should be held to higher standards than other drivers. But this doesn’t mean that ticketing a trucker is always the right thing to do. Like truckers, police officers are humans who make mistakes errors in judgment. For instance, being frustrated at the company you drive for, needing to fulfill a quota, or reading the speed gun wrong are all reasons that a police officer might give a trucker an undeserved ticket.

And tickets for truckers are serious business. They can result in the loss of a job, the loss of a CDL, and the loss of one’s status as a good driver, in addition to the monetary costs of the speeding ticket, both for the fine and for the increase in insurance payments.

But truckers who think they have an unjust speeding ticket have options. According to Overdrive Magazine, they can either pay the fine or fight the ticket. Magazine author Steven Mackay states that most owner-operators just stick with paying the ticket in order to get it out of the way. Contesting a ticket takes time, energy, and usually money as lawyers are usually contracted to assist with the legal side of the fight.

But the author goes on to suggest that just paying the ticket may have some costs of its own, including the loss of a license. According to Jim Klepper, an attorney whose firm represents CDL holders Contesting tickets and who was interviewed by Overdrive, regulations for CDL holders are only getting tougher, and paying a ticket in one state can lead to the loss of license in a home state. Because the law views paying a ticket as an admission of guilt, truckers can’t try to fight the infraction once they’ve paid, even if they were not warned of the seriousness of the infraction.

According to the article, lawyers are skilled in working with prosecuting attorneys in order to reduce or remove the consequences of a ticket. And they don’t have to be expensive. For instance, the Trucker Ticket Lawyer Stanley Alari provides a free ticket evaluation and paid services to truckers via his web site, http://trucker-ticket-lawyer.com/ Although a lawyer is recommended for contesting a ticket, truckers can also be their own lawyers, at least for the first few steps of the process. Web sites like Speeding Ticket Central (http://www.speedingticketcentral.com/) can help you research you own case and locate lawyers that might be able to help.

Truckers undergo a lot of stress on the road, and the good ones should be able to take that stress without breaking the law. But just because you think you’re under the radar doesn’t mean a radar detector hasn’t mistakenly picked you up. In order to make sure you don’t have devastating consequences from a ticket, trying to get it reduced or erased through legal action is often the best policy.