When someone asks ‘is there any way to get rid of points in BC it is a difficult question to answer, and the answer is very complicated.
A lot of people are often worried about accumulating points on their driving records. They’re concerned because the more points you have, the more likely it is that you will get a driving prohibition, and receive a driver risk premium invoice.
Points can be costly, and points can be dangerous. And the thing is, it is complicated to get rid of points on your driving record in British Columbia.
Dispute, dispute, dispute
The first thing you should know is that once points are on your record, it is a lot more difficult to get rid of them, than if the points were not on your driving record, to begin with.
The best course of action if you get a ticket that comes with points, and you’re concerned about accumulating points, is to dispute any such tickets. Disputing these tickets is the most likely way you are going to get points removed from your record, basically not having them there, to begin with.
If you didn’t dispute your ticket and ended up with points on your driving record, there are a couple of different ways to go about attempting to get rid of the points.
The first way is if you have not paid for the ticket. If you have any ticket that has not yet been paid, you may be able to get it off your driving record if you file what is known as ‘an application to unwind a deemed conviction.’
This is an application to a judicial justice in traffic court, for a ticket that you have not paid, but for which you did not dispute. This could be because you either missed the time to dispute or something that prevented you from filing the dispute, allowed the ticket to be registered against your driving record.
You can also file this application if you filed to dispute the ticket, but for reasons beyond your control, you missed the court date. This could be something like you were unable to attend court because you got into a car accident, or maybe you were sick and ended up in the hospital.
If there is a good reason for why you missed your court date, then you can apply to have a court date that you missed reinstated. The effect of doing that, is the points will be removed from your record, your ticket will be reregistered in dispute, and you won’t have to deal with points being on your record, if or until you get convicted in court.
If you’ve already paid the ticket
Tickets that have been already been paid are the most difficult to dispute.
If you have paid a ticket without going to court, this is presumed to be an acknowledgment of guilt. Paying is essentially the same as a guilty plea in a criminal charge.
Paying a ticket is considered to be a voluntary act. The decision that you make to enter the plea has to be free, has to be voluntary and has to be informed as to the consequences.
But there are circumstances where people plead guilty, and one of those criteria has not been met.
An example of this was a recent case that involved a woman’s mother who went to ICBC and used her own credit card to pay for her daughter’s ticket. The daughter didn’t know or ask her mother to do this, so this was not a voluntary guilty plea because the ticket was not being paid by the person themselves.
This is a very specific and rare case that happened, however, there are other situations as well. One that comes up quite frequently is people who pay their tickets as a result of being misled by information given to them, either by ICBC or police, or lawyers not familiar with traffic court cases.
Misinformed and paid ticket
If you are misinformed about the consequences of pleading guilty to a ticket, and you rely on that information from an official source, that can also eliminate a guilty plea.
We often see this in cases where people are told by a police officer or told by a lawyer who doesn’t understand, or a representative at ICBC, that they’re not going to get any points for this ticket. Or that this ticket isn’t going to trigger a driving prohibition or show up on your driving record.
These are good examples of why it is always important to speak to an experienced driving lawyer before paying a ticket.
Paying under duress
The other way that you could get a guilty plea withdrawn, is if the paying off your ticket did not happen freely, for example, you paid your ticket while under duress.
There are rare and limited circumstances in which a person goes to court or hires a lawyer to dispute their ticket, and circumstances transpire in court where the guilty plea is effectively pressured out of the individual.
Whether that be by the conduct of the police officer, by the Judicial Justice or by the lawyer, in those circumstances, your guilty plea would not be considered free, because you are making it under duress.
Duress has to be something more than something like financial hardship. So, if you go to court and you don’t know what you’re doing because you can’t afford to hire a lawyer, that’s not considered to be duress. It has to be some kind of external force that is causing you to make such a decision you would not otherwise make, and it usually involves some kind of threat.
This is also the most complicated matter in which you’ve paid for your ticket, to get the points off your driving record.
In those circumstances, you have to file an appeal of the conviction within 30 days of the date you were convicted by the BC Supreme Court.
Then, the conviction appeal has to be heard in the BC Supreme Court, in front of a BC Supreme Court Justice.
These appeals are lengthy, very legally complex and expensive. This is why it is so important to speak with an experienced driving lawyer before pleading guilty or paying a ticket.