Do I need to be in court on the date written on my traffic ticket?

Traffic tickets issued in New York always have a date listed, usually just below the name and address of the court. It’s important to act by that date, but your traffic matter will not be resolved on that date.

What needs to happen by that date is that a plea (preferably a plea of “not guilty”) needs to be sent in for your case. The wording on the ticket instructs the recipient to “return by mail or in person” by that date, which is why many people think that they need to show up personally. That’s not true at all.

For one, an experienced upstate traffic attorney files these pleas routinely. If you hire Selby Legal, you will never be required to appear personally, except under very serious circumstances. (In those rare cases, I always explain that possibility during my free consultation.) Anyone can enter a plea without an attorney, either by mail or yes, in person, but no one will talk to you about resolving your case if you do show up in person. (If you choose to mail in your plea, be sure to make a copy of your ticket before mailing it back.) Instead, you’ll get a notice in the mail advising of what date you or your attorney will need to go to court. Usually, that’s called a “pretrial conference,” and the prosecutor or officer will be there to discuss whether there is an opportunity to plead guilty to a lesser charge.

It gets a bit trickier in some courts, though. Many people who get a ticket in Milan show up for a pretrial conference, only to discover that there will be no deals made at that time. In that court, the plea-bargaining only takes place at trial. The situation in Gardiner is the opposite: there are no pretrial conferences, meaning that if you appear on the court date by yourself, you’d better be ready to go to trial.

Sending in a plea to a traffic ticket can feel a lot more complicated than most of us think it should. If you don’t want to go to court or try to work out how to plead not guilty, a call to Selby Legal can take all of that off your plate.