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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Posts
    2

    Default Careless Driving For Cell Phone

    My question involves a careless driving ticket from the State of: New Jersey

    The other night caused me to lose all faith in law enforcement.

    A police officer pulled me over for talking on my cell phone. I showed him my call logs, I swore up and down that I wasn't on my phone, and he essentially called me a liar. I handed him my information, in my nervousness I didn't realize I handed him an expired proof of insurance.

    He comes back with a ticket for careless driving, saying "I'm not sure what you were doing, you were probably on your cell phone, but it caused you to drive carelessly".

    He also had a ticket for driving without insurance and told me he had to tow my car. I freaked, looked for the real proof, and ended up calling home and having someone print out the proof online and bring it over. The officer told me I still had to go to court with my ticket and that it would be pled down to not having proper identification. That's not a payable offense, so ok, but I still have to go to court and pay the court costs.

    The person who brought my insurance card over was my mother. The officer re-iterated to her that he wrote me a careless driving ticket for talking on my cell phone.

    I didn't do anything wrong in this situation, cooperated entirely with the officer, and ended up with a 2 point careless driving ticket. I'm going to take this to court with my printed out phone records, and see if they can either throw both out entirely or plead them both down. The insurance shouldn't be a problem seeing as I'm insured, but my worry is over the careless driving ticket.

    I figure I should just go to court, preferably with a lawyer (I know a couple), and explain what happened. Does anyone have any advice on how to handle the careless driving charge apart from explaining what happened and showing them a printout of my call records?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Posts
    2,652

    Default Re: Careless Driving For Cell Phone?

    Well, the officer did state that he wasn't sure what you were doing and he only speculated that it could have been that you were on your cell phone.

    Not sure if it will matter that you can prove you were not. It is going to come down to what he observed your vehicle doing for him to state that it was careless driving on your part.
    -------------

    39:4-97 Careless driving

    39:4-97. A person who drives a vehicle carelessly, or without due caution and circumspection, in a manner so as to endanger, or be likely to endanger, a person or property, shall be guilty of careless driving.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2008
    Posts
    2

    Default Re: Careless Driving For Cell Phone

    The officer in question made it abundantly clear that he was writing me the ticket because I was talking on my cell phone. It was what he kept warning me about, what he kept telling me not to do, and what he told not only me but another person who showed up later.

    My main worry is that it's so convoluted they prosecutor is going to think I'm lying, or that it's going to end up being my word vs the officers word.

    When he was berrating me about the insurance thing he told me he could 'play back the audio where I said my car was uninsured'. While clearly he couldn't, do cops have a kind of always-on recorder?

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