Those of you that have been around for awhile know the whole story of why I was there so I won’t get into it. Suffice it to say I was charged with racing when I was doing no such thing.
I show up at the courtroom and sit around shitting my pants waiting for the trial to start. After about 30 minutes there is a short adjournment and my lawyer talks to the two cops. He comes back into the court room and tells me that the cops are willing to drop the racing charge for a speeding 20km/h over. I’m thrilled about this, but then he continues and says that the crown prosecutor turned that down so we are going to have to go to trial.
As you can guess I was absolutely crushed at this point. I sat sulking in the pew waiting for my case to come up. About 20 min later the CP calls my lawyer up and they speak for a minute or so. My lawyer comes back and says that he’s willing to reduce the charge to Driving with excess speed for road conditions. Fine reduced from $402 to $172 and demerits from 6 to 4, on top of that he’s willing to drop one of the two exhaust tickets if I plead guilty to the other.
I didn’t really have to contemplate this for long, I took the deal quite happily. I have no problem accepting the charge because I was actually driving too fast for road conditions. It was a momentary lapse of judgement and it has cost me quite a bit, but luckily it won’t cost me any more after this. My insurance won’t increase at all since this is not a serious offense, so that will save me about $2,000.
I had a huge problem with being charged with racing when I wasn’t doing so, so I’m fairly pleased with the judicial system with this turnout. Even still, that momentary lapse of judgement cost me nearly $600. Whole lot better than $2,800 though.
I heard one of the cops talking about me when I first walked into the courtroom and she said that they weren’t positive that I was even racing. I don’t know if I could have used that in the trial, but I was prepared to. I think she knew that I overheard this as well.
Anyhow, this will definitely keep my speeds down from now on. I have never had anything on my record before and I don’t plan to ever add anything after this.
I had my 6 demerit, $402 Careless Driving ticket reduced to a 3 demerit, $287 Red light ticket. Was very happy with that! I only had to go and talk to the crown prosecutor guy, he was really grumpy.
No this past March as I was heading home from work at 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening. Kid attempts to race me, I ignore him, cops going by other direction assume I was racing him and pull me over. Meantime this kid is long gone up the road taking a turn and running because he saw the flashing lights before I did.
That reminds me of last sunday night, me and some friends went to a back road outside of the town I live in. there was me in my 180, an SRT-4, a CRX, and an Integra GSR. We were racing up and down this completely dead road. We realized later there was a guy checking well sites just off the road but figured whatever cuz we had been there for a half hour 45 minutes and no cops so whatever we all decided we would just leave. Sure enough though as we were about to pull on to the highway we saw headlights turn on, and those god awful cherries and blueberries. He made us all pull over into a line and came up to each car 1 at a time. We all denied the racing and said we were out for a “sunday drive”, he ended up giving out 2 stunting tickets that we were supposed to “split” but the demerits would only affect 2 of us not all four.I wasn’t one of the people with the tickets and argued for the sake of my friends, 1 who would’ve lost his license with the extra demerits. He agreed to give us all 2 RO’s to split which totalled $800 but no demerits. So arguing can actually work out. We then proceded to get out of view from the cop then race home. Did I learn my lesson? No. Did it give me story to tell my friends in this boring little town mostly inhabited by trucks and very few imports? Of course!