Attorneys are officers of the court and as such are told to uphold and respect the law. This is an imperative that gets hammered home in law school. Attorneys even swear an oath to uphold the law. People who know this often find it strange that traffic ticket lawyers in Florida, such as myself, tell people to not pay traffic tickets. The law states that if you get a traffic ticket than you have to pay a fine or your driver’s license will be suspended until you do pay the ticket. People often wonder why someone who has sworn to uphold the law does not advocate that people obey these tickets laws and pay traffic tickets. On one level that makes sense. However, on a deeper level it does not make sense.

LAWS ARE FOR THE CITIZENS

Part of respecting and upholding the law is wanting the laws to be fair and to work for people, not against them. Unfortunately, that is not the case with traffic laws. For laws to be fair, they need to be transparent. If you break the law, you should know what all the consequences of doing so are. If you take your punishment for breaking the law, that should be the end of it. You should not be punished any more for breaking the same law. That does not happen with traffic tickets. When you pay a traffic ticket in South Florida, your punishment is just beginning. Paying the ticket is an admission of guilt. It is a way of saying that the officer who issued the citation was right and that you broke the law. Whether that is true or not, that admission of guilt hurts you in other ways. The first is that you will get points against your driver’s license. If you get enough points, your license will be automatically suspended. That is almost like getting punished twice for the same offense.  However, that is not the biggest problem with paying a traffic ticket.

Every time that you pay a ticket that information is part of the public record. Your auto insurance company routinely reviews the public records to find out if any of its customers are listed. When they find someone, that person’s insurance rates get raised. What that means is that paying a traffic ticket does not just have a one time cost. It has the one time cost and a monthly cost in increased auto insurance rates. Most people do not know about these hidden effects of paying traffic tickets. True respect for the law is to help people avoid the hidden and unfair portions of the law. So when a traffic ticket attorney assists someone to get out of a traffic ticket, that shows true respect for the law. It is the attorney’s way of fulfilling his or her oath. Consider also that employers look at candidates driving records. As do credit reporting companies. A simple ticket can turn into something much more serious if you just pay it.

Hopefully, the above also gives you an indication why you should never just pay a ticket. Instead, when you get a traffic ticket in South Florida, you should call an attorney and see if they attorney can help you to get out of the ticket without also having to pay the hidden costs. Our firm has helped hundreds of people to do that and we offer free consultations. There is no reason that you should not call us next time that you get a traffic ticket. Let our attorneys show you how they uphold their oaths.