Almost all of us speed. It’s impossible not to. Traffic is whizzing by you, you have somewhere to be, and a few miles over the speed limit feels no different than the actual speed limit – until you get stopped by the cops and issued a speeding ticket. And then, in most cases, you feel a little bit cheated because you were the one singled out of all of those other speeders and given a ticket. So you want to fight it. You want to beat your ticket.
But how? You aren’t sure that you want to spend money on a traffic attorney to help you, if for no other reason than it seems so easy to beat a speeding ticket.
So you talk to some people, and this is the advice you always hear – subpoena the officer. If they don’t show up, you win. This begs the question, though, of what you do if they do show up, but I want to talk today about whether or not you should subpoena the officer in your speeding ticket case.
One way to learn about what to do is to look at how the pros do it. What I mean is, for example, if you are in Seattle and get a speeding ticket, you shouldn’t wait until the date of your hearing to try to figure out what is going on. And, it’s intersting to see that, if you go and look at a Seattle traffic lawyer working in court, they rarely if ever subpoena the officer. Why would this be? Could it be that calling in the officer actually hurts your case?
Yes, it can. And here’s why.
In most states and in most courts, if you don’t subpoena the officer for your traffic ticket case, the court will read the officers report into evidence and then make a decision based on that report. Staying with our Seattle example, your Seattle traffic lawyer doesn’t usually call in the officer for one reason – he can fill in the gaps and fix the problems that exist in the report (and they almost always exist). That means our arguments which are often successful will often not be successful.
And what about those instances where you think there is no way the cop could have seen you and you think you are going to break him down on the stand? Think again. These guys are trained to do this stuff. When they testify in court they are going to go directly off of what is on the ticket – if it says they have an unobstructed view of you, then they will testify to that, and the court will believe them. So don’t call the cops in thinking you are going to go all Perry Mason on them.
It is true that if you subpoena the cops and they don’t show up that they will dismiss the case. But ask an traffic attorney and they’ll tell you that they usually do show up, and that means you usually lose.
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