Like I Needed Another Lawyer!

July 4, 2005 — seen while driving with David on the QEW

Last month I made a rather cryptic reference to December 12 as the day after which I could tell the sorry tale of what happened on my drive back to Toronto in early October. Basically, I received two moving violations in New York State less than a mile from the U.S./Canada border, two violations in two minutes that — if I pled guilty — would give me something like EIGHT points on my license and make my auto insurance rates go through the roof. Why? Because New York, Quebec, and Ontario have a reciprocal agreement whereby points are applied to your license if received in any of those jurisdictions.

It’s amazing how much one learns in a few quality moments with a very bored officer of the law.

Near midnight I’d mistakenly turned off for Niagara Falls too early and found myself in an industrial area that was nearly pitch black, full of potholes, and the lane markers had all but faded away. (I revisited this area a week and a half ago to see if my imagination had run away with me in the heat of ticket denial. It had not.) The posted speed limit was 30mph, which I might’ve seen if I wasn’t in such a hurry to a) leave this sketchy area and b) get to where there were more lights. And people. There was a car in front of me along the boulevard that didn’t seem to know its whereabouts either, veering slightly to the right in an unsure move to make a turn. Not seeing any lane markers, I figured it was a wide road with one large lane in each direction and went around the car to continue forward. That was apparently my first moving violation: “Failure to keep right.”

When I finally saw some lights again I slowed down, and that’s when I noticed the officer behind me. He followed me for a while and decided to put on his flashers when I was practically walking distance to the border.

“Have you consumed any alcohol this evening?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

He still didn’t seem convinced and asked me if I had any objections to getting breathalysed. ‘Not if it’ll make you stop asking me if I’ve been drinking!’ I thought.

“No objection, sir.”

Well, after taking a flaming eternity doing whatever he needed to do in his car sealing my fate, he gave me two pieces of paper and proceeded to launch into a lengthy explanation of what I COULD do with them. By this time, all I wanted to do was cross the border and go home because I had to go to work in the morning and it was already past midnight. He talked with his hands and I became weirdly fixated on them while he waved his beefy fingers throughout his many iterations of traffic court due process. For some strange reason I thought he gave me a ticket plus a DUPLICATE copy, not TWO tickets. Which sounds bizarre to say, but he didn’t talk about tickets in plural at all. In fact, he never even discussed the actual violation with me beyond that I was going 53mph in a 30mph zone, so I thought it was the only issue at hand. Not once did he ever mention this “failure to keep right” business.

I figured, OK, speeding. It’s clear I’m getting nowhere in dissuading him from writing the ticket(s) in the first place, he’s telling me in his own oblique way that my only recourse is to deal with this in court.

Then I arrive home, where the lighting isn’t the cop car headlight high beam blinding reflection-in-the-eye type of illumination, and discover I have to fight TWO tickets, not one.

Gigi’s Papa put in his own two cents: “You can’t let this one go, Gail. Eight points is SERIOUS.”

I’ve never had points on my license before, I had no idea what impact it made on insurance. I already find Ontario insurance rates to be ghastly higher than in BC, but he told me eight points would drastically affect my rates.

So I phoned up a local outfit that specialises in this sort of thing, and they put me on to their affiliate in New Jersey. I had to do this quickly, because the court date was only about a week later. Shortly before the court date I got a call from the New Jersey office to say that the case had been moved forward to December 12. Before the trip to Pennsylvania at the end of November a letter arrived saying the New Jersey people had given the case over to another lawyer in Niagara Falls (NY) should I agree to it, and that was the letter I had notarised at AAA in Scranton.

Of course, in the meantime the thought did cross my mind that the bill that I’d initially paid to the New Jersey people would suddenly grow by December 12. That’s usually the way it goes. And I’ve had so many lawyers in the past 22 months, what’s one more? Another thought did cross my mind, and that was to represent myself in traffic court but I kiboshed that idea quickly, for so many reasons. Not the least of which is the hassle I get at the border.

To cut short this long-winded story, I called the Niagara Falls office today for the outcome of the court appearance, to know if I should start budgeting to live on cheese sandwiches for the next five years.

“It turned out fine,” the lawyer said. “The moving violations were reduced to minor ones: a noisy muffler and a parking ticket, neither of which carry any points.”

Whew. Those fines amounted to US$105, which is the only thing left to pay to put this whole drawn-out affair behind me. That’ll teach me a lesson: keep right. And no running for the border.

Technorati tags: speeding ticket, traffic court

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