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How to Fight Your Traffic Ticket If the Officer Was Driving Ahead of You

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If you're determined to fight a traffic ticket, you should meet with a traffic attorney to discuss the angle that you'll take. One option that can sometimes be effective is to argue that the officer who wrote the ticket wasn't in a good position to clearly see your alleged driving infraction. This can be a tough argument to make in many cases, but you may have a legitimate point if the officer was driving ahead of you at the time that he or she pulled you over. You and your traffic attorney may have some success in arguing that the officer's position and the fact that he or she should have been looking at the road ahead, rather than in the mirror, led him or her to pull you over for the wrong reason. Here are some tickets that you may have luck fighting with this argument.

Following Too Closely

Some police officers will occasionally hand out tickets to motorists who follow other vehicles too closely, given that this behavior can be dangerous. If you received a ticket for this infraction from a police officer who was driving in front of you, you may want to argue that he or she was unable to clearly assess your distance from the other car. This argument will be stronger if the officer was several car lengths ahead. You can state that the officer misidentified the distance between you and the other vehicle because he or she wasn't in a good position to see.

Speeding

A speeding ticket can be difficult to dispute because of the radar evidence, but you may still want to fight a ticket if the officer was driving well ahead of you. Your chief argument in this scenario should be that you were keeping pace with traffic and that the officer failed to note how many vehicles were around you and how quickly they were traveling. You can imply that lowering your speed to below the speed of everyone else would have interfered with the flow of traffic and potentially been dangerous—something that the officer couldn't see from his or her position.

Unsafe Lane Change

If you received a ticket for making an unsafe lane change from a police officer who was driving ahead of you, this is another ticket that you may have some success in fighting. In this situation, you'll want to base your argument around the fact that the officer's position would make it difficult for him or her to accurately estimate the distance between you and other vehicles when you made the lane change, and that you actually did so safely.

Contact a traffic law attorney for more information.


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