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New Jersey's Traffic Ticket Point System

The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission assigns points based on the severity of the traffic violation. These points can cause significant increases to your insurance premiums for years at a time, though the NJ MVC does offer a Defensive Driving School program to reduce the number of active points on your record.

New Jersey traffic tickets can dish out up to eight points at once. That can wreak havoc on your finances. The Full New Jersey Points Schedule can be found here.

Defensive Driving Courses

Once every five years, you will be eligible to enroll in a defensive driving course to potentially remove active points from your driving record. These voluntary courses are offered by private organizations in partnership with the New Jersey MVC in order to increase safety on the roads.

Taking a Defensive Driving course in New Jersey opens the door to the following benefits:

• Remove up to three active points from your driving record
• Potentially qualify for an insurance discount (speak with your provider to make sure)

Of course, there are also a few noteworthy drawbacks to taking one of these courses:

• You must spend four to eight hours in the course
• You must pass a final exam
• You might also have to pay a small administration fee (typically between $15 and $50)

Ticket Violations that Don't Give Points

New Jersey has quite a few traffic laws on the books covering violations that are not punished as severely as those mentioned above. The violations listed below — although they are still tickets and can still carry burdensome fines and penalties — are a couple examples of violations that do not add points to your license:

• Failure to observe a red light camera
• Unsafe driving

This list refers exclusively to government-mandated points. Although the state of New Jersey will not issue points for these violations, insurance companies can have their own point systems and may issue points as they see fit.

How to Respond to Your Ticket

Responding to your ticket in a timely manner can make the difference between getting off scot free and racking up additional points and fees. As mentioned above, failure to respond to your ticket before the deadline can result in late fees as well as the potential suspension of your driver license.

Traffic Ticket Plea Options

Although the specifics of each ticket can vary from one county to another, the plea options will generally remain the same: guilty, not-guilty, or — typically only in non-criminal cases — no contest.

A plea of guilty immediately renders a conviction complete with the points, fines, fees, and other penalties that come along with the violation for which you have been convicted.

A plea of not-guilty starts the dispute process and enables you to fight the ticket in court. Once you've plead guilty, you can request your contested hearing and get the ball rolling in the process of fighting your ticket.

Plea Bargaining and No Contest Pleas in New Jersey

If you're a New York driver who's received a traffic ticket in New Jersey, you're in luck. Whereas states like New York do not allow any form of plea bargaining in traffic court, New Jersey's municipal courts are often quite receptive to plea bargains.

Plea bargaining is the process of trying to reach what is called a "plea deal," an admission of guilt to a lesser violation in order to reduce the penalties for you and reduce the time and financial burdens for the court. This is done in the municipal court with jurisdiction over the location where you were accused of having committed the violation.

For out-of-state ticket-recipients, that means you're going to have to do some traveling.

No-contest pleas, on the other hand, are not offered in New Jersey. These pleas — common elsewhere in the country — involve accepting the charges against you without admitting guilt. In New Jersey, however, you must explicitly either admit guilt by pleading guilty or declare lack of guilt by pleading not-guilty.

Paying Your Ticket

You can pay a New Jersey traffic ticket online, by mail, or at the municipal court with jurisdiction over the location where you received your ticket (this should be listed on the ticket near the fines).

Paying your ticket in any way is considered an "admission of guilt," which carries the following consequences:

• You can never thereafter fight or otherwise contest the paid ticket, its fees, or any of its penalties
• You will take the full brunt of the penalties, including potential license suspensions and jail time

Fighting Your Ticket

Everybody's been there before. You're driving, following all the rules of the road, and a car comes speeding past you. The police officer manning the speed trap down the road clocks the speeder with his radar but mistakes your car for theirs, giving you the ticket instead.

Whether you're in this situation or any of the countless others that New Jersey drivers face every day, you're going to want to fight your ticket.

The first option is to enter a plea of not-guilty of the ticket, mail it to the court, and eventually take time off work to argue against seasoned prosecutors with years — or even decades — of experience.

These mail-in disputes, however, tend to offer an extremely low success rate.

The second option is to go straight to arguing with those seasoned prosecutors in the hopes of obtaining a high-quality plea deal without any expert assistance.

One thing that any lawyer will tell you is that there is value in the human element. When prosecutors, judges, and juries can see a person in front of them actively explaining your case, your odds increase significantly.