OHTA.ca

Back in March I believe I got a hand held device traffic ticket while on highway 401. I went through the usual process of requesting for trial at which one was given to me in July. Through research and asking couple friends I read that there is a strong possibility the officer wont attend and if he does you should try as best as you can to put off the trial. One such way is to request for disclosure a bit late. I did and on the day of the trial the prosecutor brought a written disclosure of the event with him which was too late so I asked the judge to put it off to give me time to review. This disclosure stated exactly what happened the day of. Now my plan is to get this ticket thrown out by continuous postponement if possible. If the officer does show up next week I would like to know what I can use to do so. The same friend I reached out to who is a criminal lawyer has a bit of knowledge with traffic tickets; advised me that I should make another request for full disclosure this time asking for audio evidence. Is this a possible route? Has anyone tried this way before? In the court I heard them mentioning that the OPP doesn't provide this? Is this true? i dont want to turn up at the court and look stupid and thus pissing off the JP. Is there also any other way to get the date pushed back if in case the officer arrives? Hope someone can provide some recommendations.

Thanks in advance!

Also note that the ticket was poorly written and the notes he made were not clear.

Officers are in court almost always.

If you wait until your trial date to ask for disclosure, the delay is attributed to you, not the other way around. The responsibility is yours to request disclosure in a timely manner as requests may take several weeks to complete.

Even if the delay wasn't your fault to being with, you were only charged in March.

Audio/video is not common. If it exists, they'd give it to you. If it doesn't, there's nothing to give you. You're likely not going to get an answer to your request as you again have left them with no time to respond. They'll likely tell you there is no audio/video at your trial. Also, you've already had an opportunity in court to wrap up this disclosure request already.

If the notes are not clear, you should have brought up that fact when they were given to you, or at the very least, made some attempt to figure something out before you show up to trial yet again.

You're days away from trial and you're talking about requests yet again at the very last minute. You should be prepared to have a trial next week. They'll put up with it once, but you're pushing your luck here.

And it's not cool to game the system. That's not what the system is there for.