I also managed to beat a traffic ticket once, but the incompetence of the registry was my salvation.
I was cited for driving in the breakdown lane at a construction site. I did, in fact, drive in the breakdown lane because traffic was jammed up, and my exit was barely a quarter mile away.
When I got the summons for court however, the idiots cited me for "failure to keep to the right".
I let the trooper testify that the breakdown lane was on the right of the other lanes, then entered the summons into evidence and pointed out that the trooper testified that I was on the right.
The judge looked at it, and banged his gavel: "Case dismissed."
I hightailed it out of that court.
Oh, and Trooper Pinky, if you're by any chance reading this, I owe you a beer some day. Just pull me over and escort me to the nearest bar. It's still the same car.
I'm going to call a mathematician rather than a lawyer.
I mean, if he can convince a judge with this, then how hard could it be?
And I got out of what would have been a very expensive ticket. It was one of the few times I ever got to use my engineering degree.
The only reason I was able to prevail (without getting into details) is I had witnesses in several other cars at the intersection that gave me the necessary "data points", under oath, that I needed to plug in the equations.
I won't say that the judge actually understood the math I presented, because I'm sure he didn't, but I was able to demonstrate why the officer's statements couldn't be accurate. That was good enough to get off in this particular case.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, you can always try to baffle them with bullshit....
I also managed to beat a traffic ticket once, but the incompetence of the registry was my salvation.
I was cited for driving in the breakdown lane at a construction site. I did, in fact, drive in the breakdown lane because traffic was jammed up, and my exit was barely a quarter mile away.
When I got the summons for court however, the idiots cited me for "failure to keep to the right".
I let the trooper testify that the breakdown lane was on the right of the other lanes, then entered the summons into evidence and pointed out that the trooper testified that I was on the right.
The judge looked at it, and banged his gavel: "Case dismissed."
I hightailed it out of that court.
Oh, and Trooper Pinky, if you're by any chance reading this, I owe you a beer some day. Just pull me over and escort me to the nearest bar. It's still the same car.
I caught the cop in an obvious lie using his own testimony- he completely contradicted himself and said he pursued me while going 65 mph until he caught me, but said I was going 85 mph. Exactly how does that work?
I was actually going the speed limit of 55 because I saw him from the very beginning, and this was a well-known trap area, but I was on a bike and cops hate bikes.
Despite making his testimony look like the lie that it was, I still got the ticket. Then the cop cornered me in the hallway and said if I ever set foot in his town again he'd arrest me on sight! Hey, officer, if you don't want to sound stupid in court, keep your mouth shut next time. Otherwise, I can't help you.