Consumer Question:
Great article last week Lee about fighting tickets in court. However, can you fight a ticket if you’ve been involved in an accident too?
Here’s what happened. I was driving along New St. going through an intersection where there was a traffic light. Just before I entered the intersection the light turned yellow. There was a car waiting for the red light and I guess he thought I was going to stop, so he proceeded to turn right on the red, and we collided. The police officer gave me a ticket for "Disobeying the Amber Light, and Failing to Stop."
I was not at fault for this accident and I’m deeply disturbed I was ticketed for going through a yellow light. With this ticket, and accident, it makes it look like it was my fault and will dramatically affect my insurance rate! How can I fight this?
Dear Deeply Disturbed, this is a two part process you’ll need to take to ensure your insurance rate isn’t affected.
You need to go to court to get the ticket, and charge for the accident dropped. Then you’ll need to ensure your insurance company doesn’t find you “at-fault” for the accident.
To give you a better perspective with how the police and insurance companies differ when it comes to an accident, the police determine if a law has been broken. Your insurance company determines who was at fault for the accident. The rules for determining fault, varies from province to province, but the bottom line is it’s the “fault” which affects your insurance rate.
Ironically, even if you’re not charged for the accident by the police, your insurance company could still find you at-fault for the accident. However, it’s much easier to fight a “fault ruling” from your insurance company when you haven’t been charged or ticketed by the police.
Many drivers don’t know a yellow light means STOP . . . unless unsafe to do so. An example of being “unsafe to stop” would be if there was a car behind you, and if you were to suddenly brake they may hit you. Other mitigating factors may be the road or weather conditions. The road may be wet and braking quickly would cause you to spin out. The question is; was it unsafe for you to have stopped at the yellow light?
Before going to court, try to remember what you said at the scene of the accident. You may not realize what you said could be used against you in court. You may have said something that caused you to appear guilty, when you weren’t.
An example of this is if the officer asked; “Did you see the car before you hit it?” If you answered; "no, I didn't see the car." The police officer might determine you weren’t paying attention, and driving carelessly. A better way of responding would be; "by the time I saw the car it was too late to avoid the collision."
If the officer decides to charge you for the accident, they need to advise you that you're not obligated to say anything unless you wish to do so. But anything you say may be used as evidence in court. So if you continued to say something like; “I’m late for work”, it may be used as evidence to support the assumption you were speeding through the yellow light. The question is, did the officer advise you of this? If they didn’t they can’t use what you said as evidence.
Traffic Court is unlike any other court in that it has to establish a balance between the high volume of cases, limited time to spend on each case, and the need to adhere to a strict set of procedural rules.
What this means to you is that you need to be fully prepared when you enter into the courtroom. If the weather was a mitigating factor a weather report supporting this would be helpful.
If you're found to be fumbling around with your notes and delaying the court proceedings, you may indirectly be prejudicing yourself against the courts for an unfavorable verdict of guilty.
There are procedural rules that that you need to follow, for example ‘hearsay evidence’.
I asked Brian Lawrie, founder of POINTTS for his thoughts on this. He said; "you can’t provide evidence to a non guilty plea by saying that the guy at the news stand said he saw the car just pull out at the last second. You would have had to subpoena that person as a witness to allow their statement as evidence. At the same time, if the officer provides photos of the accident, the person who took the photos needs to be present for them to be used as evidence. Any number of these kinds of pieces of evidence, not properly presented could allow your case to be dismissed. That’s why good representation is critical."
Assuming your case gets dismissed, or you’ve been found “not guilty,” you then need to ensure your insurance company considers you not to be at fault for the accident.
Not to “disturb you” further, but I’ll be addressing the second part of this process in next week’s column.
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