Traffic ticket with wrong citation

[ehjay786]

I was pulled over for making a U-Turn on a red light. When I received my ticket in the mail the citation number is 21453(b) VC which I believe is failure to stop or yield to pedestrians before making a right turn. Isn't this the wrong citation? Can I use this to have my ticket dismissed? Possibly at the arraignment?

 

[mightymoose]

No... the officer can amend the ticket. What you don't see on your citation is what the officer has written on the back of his... which is a statement regarding what happened and a diagram. It is common to write the wrong code, and simple mistakes are correctable.

Just at a glance, it appears that 21453(c) was the correct section... hardly significant for a dismissal.

 

[CdwJava]

I was pulled over for making a U-Turn on a red light. When I received my ticket in the mail the citation number is 21453(b) VC which I believe is failure to stop or yield to pedestrians before making a right turn. Isn't this the wrong citation? Can I use this to have my ticket dismissed? Possibly at the arraignment?

Here is the violation:

CVC 21453(b) Except when a sign is in place prohibiting a turn, a driver,
after stopping as required by subdivision (a), facing a steady
circular red signal, may turn right, or turn left from a one-way
street onto a one-way street. A driver making that turn shall yield
the right-of-way to pedestrians lawfully within an adjacent crosswalk
and to any vehicle that has approached or is approaching so closely
as to constitute an immediate hazard to the driver, and shall
continue to yield the right-of-way to that vehicle until the driver
can proceed with reasonable safety.

When it goes to trial, the officer will testify as to the elements of the offense. if he articulates a U-Turn violation of some kind, and this is the violation that you are being tried under, then you ought to prevail handily because he would not have established any of the elements of the offense.

However, if the U-Turn also included this failure to yield as indicated here, then you may be guilty of the violation.

You can seek the officer's notes through discovery and see if he has anything written on them to indicate what he will testify to.