Ouch. $287 for speeding. Where were you speeding? Never mind, don’t post if you were speeding or not. You probably weren’t :). Anyway, where did you get this ticket? CHP or SDPD?
Anyway, if you need to take traffic school, I’d do it online. Because the trafic school thing is a joke and you can pretty much breeze through it on line versus spending a lot of time with traffic school in person.
BTW: I have a online traffic school coupon, i think you can get like 10%. I’ll post the coupon code if you’re interested, provided you verify that you’re eligible for traffic school.
BTW#2: Not a lawyer here. But, my experience (:)) There’s actually two ways to contest a ticket, though I wouldn’t even bother to try for a speeding ticket unless you either can’t go to traffic school or you feel like you’ve been wronged.
1)You can go to court in person
or
2) You can contest the ticket by doing a “trial by declaration”
If you really want to contest the ticket, I’d do #2 (trial by declaration first). The process is basically you call up the court clerk requesting a trial by declaration. They’ll mail you a bunch of forms, and you fill out the form and present your traffic citation case. You have a few weeks to do this. Then you mail it back (certified mail) pre-pay your fine. The court then requests the citing officer to respond to your trial by declaration. Then based on the input from both of you, the judge (I think) makes a decision. If you lose, you can re-appeal in court in person. If you then lose in court again, you can ask the judge to send you to traffic school, which (unless you’re a jackass in court and in writing), they’ll most likely grant to you (because it’s more $$$$ for CA)
If you do #1 (go to court first), you only have one chance. Generally can’t appeal the decision made when you appear in person. The only thing you can do if you lose in person is request the judge to send you to traffic school after you lose.
Doing #2 gives you two chances, #1 gives you 1. Plus there’s the possibility that if you do #2, the citing officer won’t respond in time by the needed date, since he/she has to do this on his own time. Versus if you appear in court, and the court needs to get the officer’s statement in person, he/she will be on overtime pay to appear in court(hence the fallacy that “most officers won’t show up in court”)
Again, I probably wouldn’t do this for a speeding ticket, because I doubt you’ll win, since it’s pretty much hard to convince the judge you weren’t speeding.
The only thing i would consider is if you are ineligible for traffic school (you’ve gotten another ticket within the past 18months), because you have nothing to lose. Often, if you write to the court and/or appear in court in that case, the judge will still let you go to traffic school if it wasn’t an egregious violation (since again, the state needs the $$$$)
Anyway, I’ve had 3 of 5 my tickets were dismissed this way(all were non-speeding related). The remaining two were speeding tickets, the first one I lost by trial by declaration. And the second one I didn’t even bother to contest since I deserved that one(hence the online traffic school discount).
