Tuesday, March 9, 2010

So far on the ticket-

Well to update everyone on the ticket situation so far, I looked at the ticket last tuesday and was surprised to find that it had been 14 days since it had been issued. I had only one day left to plead guilty or not guilty on it and send it to whom ever, wherever it goes.

'Well the mail goes pretty fast locally' I was thinking, when I found that I could just enter my plea via the Internet, ahh the lovely Internet. But damn the Internet to hell; it wouldn’t recognize my license number. So I mailed it in, to Albany. Well I suppose as long as it was in the mail before the deadline it’s okay, but I never assume things will be okay with New York State. I contacted the lawyer, and while he told me that he doesn’t like to send the tickets in the mail he reassured me all would be well. He recommended another way, going to the building on Rector Street or wherever is closest, and entering the plea in person, darn, if there is a next time, we’ll do it that way. So when I get notification in the mail for a court hearing date, then I’ll go to the lawyer's office with one hundred and fifty dollars and he’ll work what I sure hope is his magic, and maybe I won’t have the 3 points on my license nor will I owe the state two hundred and seventy dollars. I almost think in the back of my mind that none of it is worth it, and that I might as well have just paid the ticket and pleaded guilty, but I'm going through with it on principle. If everyone who receives big tickets (all tickets are big) for such trivial things which might not have even went down in such a way that was actually misconstrued as illegal, and most certainly not dangerous; then the whole system would slow down, a lot of people would get their cases dismissed, and because of more people getting their tickets thrown out, the police might then be re-taught on proper ways to give real moving violations for crazy cases.

Actually I just had a customer in my cab who asserted this same theory, as he also recieved a ticket for something similar. He got a ticket for going through a red light after he was in the cross walk, and despite him saying he pulled through for safety reasons, the cop heard nothing of it. Well of course I disagree that he should've gone through the intersection, but I didn't tell him this. He said he believed the police intentionally give tickets to the smallest infractions because the drivers are more likely to be good people who are easier to deal with. "As a guy who works in the hospital all the time" he said, "I don't blame them when I see the shit that they have to deal with sometimes."

2 comments:

NYCabbie said...

When you try to plea online there are two sections, one asks about ticket number and second asks about your DMV information, one is suppose to choose either of them but if you fill both parts, it will give you error of not finding your DMV licende number. If this happens you need to clear browser's cache and try again which will work, it happened with me too.
Now best bet to plea not guilty is online and reasons for that are
1) Police officer who gave you the ticket is suppose to file it in the system with in 30 days, if he doesnt you are automatically not guilty and sometimes they just misplace the ticket and this happens, I got a ticket and police officers put it in the system on 27 days after date of issuing of ticket, In this case you have more days to prepare yourself for the damage also you might get hearing date 8-10 months after the ticket was issued.
When you mail it in, either police officer have lost the ticket you will certainly get the hearing date because you yourself filed a piece of record to the DMV.
I hope this will help to many.

NYC taxi photo said...

Wow, i think this is extremely helpful. yeah i may have putting either license number or ticket number, but i didn't restart my browser and empty the cache before trying again. and that makes sense that they'd need to file the ticket too, and of course the internet is more of a gaurantee then perhaps getting the original ticket lost in the mail.

thanks for the advice!