A recent situation where this played out for me began on March 4, 2019 when I got into a serious car accident and was declared on the scene to be the at fault driver. I’d mistaken a temporary stop sign for a warning of an upcoming stop sign and didn’t realize my mistake until I was hit at 65 mph by an oncoming vehicle. I wound up with a broken sternum and some lacerations. While at the hospital I received a summons to appear in court.
Traffic court in my county turned out to be absolutely ridiculous. I was originally charged with careless driving causing bodily injury (mine and the driver of the other vehicle), which could involve up to a year of jail time. I had three lousy options as to how to approach the situation. I could plead guilty to just careless driving (with no jail time) or I could plead not guilty and go to trial. The third option I had to find out on my own, which is that I could plead no contest, meaning I admit no guilt but the court and the law treat me as guilty of the original offense in sentencing.
The issue with pleading guilty had to do with the way the careless driving law in my state was written. It basically implies that you’re watching Netflix while driving—driving along with no regard to anything drivers usually pay attention to. I’d been paying attention to everything; I’d just made a mistake about the stop sign, had a brain fart. To me, that hardly constituted careless driving. I felt like to plead guilty to that would be lying in court. I’m actually being invited to commit perjury!
I told my attorney that committing perjury was not the way I wanted to begin my new life of lying and deception. He asked me if I wanted to go to trial, then. After considering that carefully I decided that wouldn’t be charitable. I especially thought of the lady who’d immediately stopped and come over to see if I was OK. She had been kind to me and gotten me calmed down (I’d been screaming). I didn’t want her to be dragged into court as a witness. And anyway, there wasn’t any question that I’d been guilty of running a stop sign. I wasn’t trying to assert my total innocence in the matter. There just wasn’t an option on the table for me to plead guilty to failing to stop at a stop sign, even after having my attorney ask the prosecutor for it twice. He told me in no uncertain terms that that was an impossible request and he didn’t expect the prosecution to budge on it. They didn’t
I made the decision to plead no contest and put myself at the mercy of the court. I knew I was risking a jail sentence which I could have removed by taking the plea deal. My attorney told me that while it was unlikely that I’d be sentenced to jail, it was still a possibility, and was I really willing to risk it? I’d talked it over with my husband who told me he understood where I was coming from and would support me no matter what. As I put it to my attorney, “I might go to jail, but I get to keep my integrity.”
The day came for me to make that no contest plea on January 16, 2020. For some reason the prosecutor did not want me to do that so she showed up at the court and said a bunch of stuff which I couldn’t follow. The next thing, my attorney and the judge got into some kind of argument about whether or not I even had the right to plead no contest. My attorney had his laptop and a statute book open and was citing precedents and laws in a lively back and forth with the judge. It was quite a bit of courtroom drama!
My attorney finally asked for a short recess and once we were alone I asked him what in the world had just happened. Apparently I was being asked to plead no contest while still admitting guilt. I was like, “That kind of defeats the whole purpose of pleading no contest!” He said he agreed and then asked if he should ask for a postponement. I said that sounded good as I did not feel in my right mind to make a new decision on the spot. My next court date was set for March 24.
Then covid happened, and I was not back in court until September 22. By that time a new attorney and a new prosecutor had been assigned to my case. About two weeks before the scheduled court appearance, my attorney called me up to tell me he had good news on my case. The prosecution wanted to offer me a new plea deal: plead guilty to failing to stop at a stop sign, pay a fine and take some kind of online safe driving class. Sounded reasonable to me, so I took it. The fine hurt but wasn’t too awful and taking the class turned out to be a really positive experience. And after all this rigmarole, I finally was allowed to take responsibility for what I’d actually done!
Best of all, I got to keep my integrity and stay out of jail!