[VIDEO] Law School Student Reckless Driving in Virginia
If you are a law student or hoping to go to law school, and you received a reckless driving ticket in Virginia, you need to talk with me about what your options are and how we can hopefully handle the case together. Contact me today.
As you know by now, when you apply for the bar after law school, you have to go through not only the bar exam, but also a character and fitness portion of the exam. They go through a lot of your history about issues you’ve had, convictions and arrests you may have had, and things like that. So your criminal record definitely does play into the character and fitness portion of the exam, and in some states, they even want to know about traffic tickets.
Because of that character and fitness portion of the bar exam and the application process, you definitely need to be concerned if you have received a reckless driving ticket in Virginia, or any traffic ticket in Virginia for that matter. The good news is that there are options in your case to try to get the charge either reduced or dismissed altogether.
Obviously, the first area we look for in any case where you’re accused of violating the law, is to see if we can argue that simply the Commonwealth does not have the evidence to prove that you’re guilty. We definitely want to analyze the Commonwealth’s evidence and see if we have any argument that they are missing part of their evidence. This even applies at court. Sometimes maybe they have the evidence, however they forget something in trial, and that could lead to dismissing the charge completely.
Even if you know the Commonwealth can prove the case, there still may be ways to get the charge reduced or dismissed. In general, depending upon the judge we have, you might be eligible to go to driving school to get the charge broken down to a lesser offense. Also, depending on the officer who wrote the ticket and the judge who’s hearing the case, it may be possible to work some type of an agreement with the officer to get the charge reduced. And finally, some judges will work with us if you have a good record and we can explain your situation. Some judges will simply help us out and reduce the charge, especially if you have a clean driving record prior to this.
They key thing to know is that you definitely should not just pay the ticket and consider it done. In some of the more southern areas of Virginia, and more rural areas, they do allow some sort of prepayment for reckless driving. There’s some kind of form they generate and they may offer that, “Oh, you can just pay a fine and be done.” However, anytime you prepay a traffic ticket or let yourself be found guilty in your absence, you will be found guilty. If you send in money ahead of time or you don’t show up and just wait for a bill, you will be found guilty of reckless driving normally. You want to try to prevent that from happening.
As you can see, there’s a lot of things we can do together in this kind of a case to try to get a good outcome and try to avoid you having a reckless driving conviction in Virginia. If you find yourself in this situation, definitely contact me today.