Handling Orlando car accidents we have been contacted by many car accident victims who have been denied representation because “they received the ticket.” Oftentimes we suggest these callers send us the police report only to find serious questions about the validity of the citation. Whenever the investigating officer obtains only one version of the accident without considering the physical evidence it is easy to form the wrong conclusion. Usually this occurs when the injured party is unable to communicate. Often, these car accident victims have been transported by ambulance for emergency medical care, leaving only the offending driver to tell the officer “what happened.”
Having many law enforcement officers in my family as well as personally working for the Legal Adviser to the Boston Police Commissioner, I have the greatest respect and admiration for law enforcement. Officers are trained to determine from all available sources of information how an accident occurred and to cite the party at fault for the accident. However, not being professional engineers nor accident reconsructionists, it is understandable that the most commonly relied on evidence of who was at fault for the car accident is the information from the drivers involved.
Although the fact that a driver received a traffic citation is inadmissible at the civil trial for personal injury, the significance is that Orlando car accident lawyers should not be mislead into believing that the ticketed individual is always at fault. It is important to look beyond who received the ticket before denying someone representation. It is simply too easy for busy personal injury lawyers to assume that if a driver received the ticket that that person was actually at fault.
To be sure, a majority of the time the ticketed individual turns out to be the liable party and we do decline representation. However, we suggest that injury or wrongful death cases involving Orlando car accidents and car accidents throughout Florida deserve meaningful consideration by lawyers handling these injury cases.
