EPTSome background info: I have been driving since I was 15 with my permit 2 days after my birthday. I got my license the day I turned 16 and since then I have never gotten in an accident or received any kind of ticket or verbal warnings by cops.
In fact, I hardly ever see cops when I drive.
Anyway, the two tickets I got in November pulling out of my friend's house, we were going to go eat somewhere I think. About 2 minutes after I pull out his neighborhood there's a stop sign at a nearby intersection. All ways must stop. Now, I'm usually very good about stopping since my mom always got tickets for those and generally I'm a pretty safe driver. But this intersection is really really secluded so I may have done a rolling stop but to the best of my memory I stopped completely because I remember braking and then changing the song on my cd player.
So after I pass that intersection a cop pulls me over. He asks for license and registration. Now, I only drive my car during weekends since after high school I left my car at home [ college parking too costly ] I always leave my insurance registration in the same place but when I'm not home my mom just drives my car since it's better mileage.
So when I look for my registration I can't find it because my mom put it somewhere else. I explain this to the cop and ask for a few moments. I look everywhere and just can't find it, so then I find an expired card [ 1 year ] and call my mom to ask her where she put my insurance registration. She can't recall either but she says it should definitely be okay since the cop can pull my info from the expired card and see that the car is covered.
So 30 minutes later the cop comes from his car and gives me 2 tickets, one for the stop sign violation, and second for no proof of insurance. The thing is, while he was in his car I actually found the paper that said my car was insured and registered validly for this year. So I showed it to him and was trying to hand it to him but instead he replied with ' You can dispute this in court '
Naturally I'm going to court in 5 days. I was wondering what I should do since I guess I'm representing myself and I don't really have experience in this kind of situation. All I know is that I will refer to my perfect driving record to state that I didn't pass the stop sign without stopping. I was also thinking about bringing my friend who was in the car the entire time as a witness but that might seem shady since he's my friend he will stick up for me [ judge's perspective ]
As for the insurance ticket my mom says that should definitely not be a problem since A) You can look it up and he simply didn't, even with the expired card. and B) He decided to not even look at the registration which I found after he wrote up the tickets.
Any help would be great, thanks for reading.
