What Happens When: I get 3 speeding tickets in 18 months?

Speeding is the most cited traffic violation in the country. Over 41 million speeding tickets are issued each year in the United States.

And if you get multiple speeding tickets in New York within a short amount of time, you could find yourself in a very tough situation. The third within 18 months is especially critical.

If you are convicted of three speeding violations within an 18-month period, you will face a mandatory license revocation in New York.

What matters is the day that the ticket is issued, not the day of conviction. It does not matter if you plead guilty a few days after getting the ticket or are convicted at trial five years later. The day of issue never changes.

Example 1: You get a speeding ticket in January 2019, one in January 2020, and one in January 2021. The third ticket is 24 months after the first ticket. No mandatory revocation.

Example 2: You get a speeding ticket in January 2019, another in January of 2020, and a third in May of 2020. The first ticket and the last ticket are 16 months apart. If you’re guilty of all three, you will be revoked.

Speeding tickets in New York City all go to trial, so if you’ve got three in 18 months, you will need to win a “not guilty” on at least one of them. That’s not easy to do, but it’s much more likely to happen if you’re represented by an attorney.

Speeding tickets in most other parts of the state can be plea bargained, at least to some degree. But plea bargaining speeding tickets can be complicated when you have a bad record, or when you have other tickets pending. Many prosecutors will not make reduction offers if you have a bad record or if you have speeding tickets awaiting trial.

If you have three pending speeding tickets, you will need to have at least one of them pled down to a non-speeding ticket to avoid a mandatory revocation. There is a considerable amount of strategy to handling these situations the right way.

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