Driving on Suspended License Charge- Three Options

If you’re facing a Virginia driving on a suspended license charge, you have options. Here are three of them:

1. Ignore It

You can certainly ignore your charge and hope that it will go away. However, it’s not going to happen.

If you simply don’t go to court and ignore the fact that you’re charged with driving on a suspended license, the court will most likely issue a capias warrant (a bench warrant) for your arrest.

What that means is you’ll be facing an additional charge for failure to appear in court. Even if you weren’t facing jail for the original charge, you may really be facing jail due to failing to appear.

2. Go to Court by Yourself

For your driving on a suspended license case, you will typically have two hearings. The first hearing that you typically have is usually an arraignment.

Arraignment is a time when the court is going to tell you that you’re entitled to an attorney, and it is 100% safe to go to the arraignment yourself without a lawyer.

The important thing to understand, though, is that when it comes time for a trial, you could be facing a risk of jail time. Going to trial without an attorney could be a very risky proposition.

I’ve seen lots of different people come in with driving on suspended license cases without attorneys, and the results can be quite varied.

One thing that concerns me is I’ve seen prosecutors put on driving on the suspended license case and argue that the person should be convicted when there is a clear lack of notice that the person was suspended.

In other words, the defendant had no legal notice that they were actually suspended, and it was up to the judge to dismiss the case.

Without an attorney, you’re putting something very important in one man’s hands. If those defendants had an attorney I would hope that the prosecutor would be convinced by the defense attorney that they had a bad case.

But when there is no attorney involved on your side, you have no one to lobby for you and to try to push the legal issues.

Also, a local, experienced, defense attorney will know the key players and can hopefully help negotiate a much better outcome in your case than you were otherwise facing.

For example, on a first offense of driving on suspended license, if you get your license fixed before we go to court, sometimes we can get the prosecutor to amend the charge to something simple like not having a license in your possession, which is just a $10 traffic ticket.

That’s a much better outcome than a misdemeanor, and unfortunately, if you don’t have an attorney, a lot of prosecutors aren’t willing to do that. They have to be pushed in that direction.

3. Hire an Attorney

While I’m not saying that every driving on a suspended license case requires an attorney, it makes sense to hire one when possible. The main disadvantage of hiring an attorney is the cost.

It certainly does cost some money out of your pocket to hire someone to represent you; however, there are great advantages that far outweigh the small monetary cost.

As I mentioned above, an attorney will hopefully be able to navigate your case to get the best outcome possible, and in many cases that might be amending the charge to a lesser offense.

Or if you’re charged with driving on a suspended license third or subsequent offense, an attorney may be able to help keep you out of jail.