I've been wanting to write this blog for quite some time, and now, it's time.
Last year I got nine tickets. One for reckless driving, one for failure to stop at a stop sign, one for failure to signal a turn, and six for speeding. Exactly none of them went on my record. My friends constantly ask me "how in the world do you do it?" and I'm tired of detailing all the steps and writing and rewriting it on various forums at various times. From here on out, I'll just point them to TicketBastard.
First things first, I am not a lawyer. I do not practice law, and this blog does not constitute any kind of legal advice. Second, I live in Texas and I am most familiar with the traffic courts in Texas. If you do not live in Texas, the information here may or may not be applicable to you. It may not help you, and it may even hurt you. If you have a serious ticket or if you're inexperienced in the courts of your state, it is highly advisable that you hire a lawyer. Even the TicketBastard still hires a lawyer from time to time.
A little bit of backstory before I get into the real meat of this blog. This is the story of how it all came about. When I was a kid of 16, who barely had his license four whole months, I did something really stupid and got a really large ticket as a result: 65 mph in a 30 mph zone. There's no justifying what I did, it was a residential area and I was being really, really dumb. Of all the tickets I didn't deserve, that's one I truly did.
Now, in Texas you can take defensive driving for almost any ticket you get. Today you can do that once a year, back then, you could do it once every three years. Now, if that had been one of those tickets, or if I could have just paid it, I would have done so and our story would have ended here. There would be no TicketBastard and no blog. I wouldn't be an unrepentant speeder, and I wouldn't have racked up so many tickets that I couldn't even remember all of them today. You might as well ask me to remember all the times I've eaten steak. I can remember the really memorable ones and some of the not so memorable ones, but the majority have been lost to the sands of time. Let me just say that the last time I could count them all, I was well over 60, and that was 10 years ago. You do the math.
So, what happened? First, in Texas you can only take defensive driving for tickets that are less than 25 mph over the speed limit. Since I was 35 over, that wasn't really an option. Since I had doubled the speed limit and I was only 16, the court required a mandatory court appearance -- with my parents. Now, my parents were understandably pissed and grounded me pretty heavily. And, this was also a very small town, and my stepfather was very good friends with the judge. Between the two of them, they cooked up a plan to really put the fear of the law into me while at the same time keeping the insurance company from raping my stepfather's pocketbook.
This is where things went wickedly, wickedly wrong. They decided to make me attend traffic court, and they scheduled it for a heavy day filled with the dregs of society. This was supposed to teach me that only the most irresponsible people get tickets and that a courtroom was the last place I wanted to spend my time. Unfortunately, in the words of my stepfather, I was "always trying to figure out how to get away with something." I was also usually smart enough to do just that. As I sat there in court that day, watching everyone plead their traffic cases (since I was convienently at the bottom of the docket), I noticed a strange pattern. Now, this particular judge was a very nice, very lienent man, but I noticed that everyone, without fail, got some kind of break on their case. Some didn't have much of a case, others had a decent excuse, but it pretty much seemed that just by the virtue of taking the time to appear in court, they ended up far better off than if they'd just done like every Joe Schmo and just paid their ticket.
Now let me tell you, these really were the "undesirables" in town. As it normally is in most traffic cases. That's because most of the people who fight do so because they have no other option -- they simply don't have the money to pay their tickets. Most of them were there just to get extensions to pay them, but usually, they got a reduction in fees to go with it. That was just because the judge was a nice guy. But, still, I was seeing that just because you got a ticket didn't mean you were guilty ... even if you actually were.
When it came time for me to see the judge, he gave me a really stern lecture and told me he hoped I'd learned my lesson. He also asked what my parents had done when they found out about my ticket. I told him, and though I can't distinctly remember the punishment, I do remember it being very harsh -- my parents were not lenient people. I'll never forget what he said next. He told me that ordinarily with such a ticket, he would add a substantial additional fine to the already substantial mandatory fine, and that he would have pressed for a license suspension. But, he felt I'd already been punished enough, and he was just going to dismiss the ticket outright.
And thus, the TicketBastard was born. I realized that although I had gotten somewhat lucky, just a little bit of time in court and a little effort could go a long way to keeping tickets off your record. I didn't achieve it overnight, I made a lot of mistakes, and several of my early tickets went on my record, but in the end, I learned the truth behind speeding tickets.
The truth that I'll now pass on to you.
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