A lot of times people want to explain old convictions when they appear in court for a new offense. Can you?
Yes and no. Typical lawyer answer.
If you’re in front of a judge for a traffic or misdemeanor case, your driving record and/or criminal history may come into evidence for sentencing. For sentencing purposes, just about everything is allowed in as long as it’s loosely relevant.
Thus, you’re allowed to explain the nature of a prior offense.
But here’s the problem: the judge probably won’t care.
I don’t mean to be overly cynical, but traffic dockets are busy. The judge has a lot of cases to get through in a short amount of time. They’ll listen, but only to a point.
For the most part, I just don’t think they want to hear why you were speeding two years ago. Heck, they may not even care why you were speeding for the current case! The real questions of interest are:
1. Can the Commonwealth prove that you did it?
2. Does your driving record justify giving you a break?
Most of the time, if your record has tickets on it, the judge doesn’t care to get into the specifics of why they’re there.
With that said, we always want to highlight the good things about your driving record. For example, we can point out how long it’s been since your last moving violation. And we can certainly prevent other mitigating evidence to try to get the judge to give us the best possible outcome.
Photo by Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious