One great reason to call a Virginia traffic lawyer: it might save you from coming to court. A defendant from California learned the hard way that traveling in from out-of-state doesn’t necessarily beat the charge.
I’ve had this video transcribed for visitors who prefer to read the content.
Hello, I’m Andrew Flusche. Today I wanted to talk to you about something I saw in court a couple weeks ago. A gentleman came up for a speeding case in Stafford County; he was charged with just a basic speeding charge. He was from California and he had apparently flown in or driven in to Stafford, VA all the way from California for a speeding case.
He asserted to the judge that the clerk’s office told him that if he appeared and brought his clean record, the judge would send him to driving school to have the case dismissed. For anyone who is in Stafford County or practices there normally, they would know that that’s actually not true.
In Stafford County, the normal judges do not like to send people to driving school when they’re out of state. It just isn’t something that normally happens in Stafford for out of state residents. And thus, I don’t think that there is any way that the clerk’s office would have told a defendant that. The clerk’s office doesn’t give legal advice in the first place, so they probably wouldn’t have said anything like that at all. They might have said that it’s possible to get driving school, but they wouldn’t have said “Come and it will definitely happen.”
Well, the defendant was very upset of course because he had traveled all the way from California for this case and he didn’t get the outcome that he thought he was going to get.
My point here today is that this situation could have been solved by talking with a local traffic attorney. Any attorney who regularly practices in Stafford could have told the gentleman that he probably wouldn’t be eligible for driving school, that it’s not something that would generally happen. Even with a perfect record, if you have an out of state drivers’ license, it’s hard to have happen in Stafford. And, more importantly, a local traffic attorney could have probably appeared on his behalf without him needing to come back for court. So that would have saved him the expense and time of traveling all the way here.
So it would have been something very important for him to do and it would have made a lot of sense for him to talk with a local traffic attorney and perhaps even hire somebody to go for him. Most traffic attorneys could have appeared and handled the entire case without him coming to court for less than the cost of his travel expenses to travel all the way across the country.
Definitely talk to a local traffic attorney if you get a ticket anywhere in the Fredericksburg, Stafford, Spotsylvania area. That way you know what you’re facing, what outcomes might happen, and if maybe the attorney can handle it without you coming to court.