Hello,

Thank you for asking your very important legal question at Justanswer.com . I will be happy to assist you!

I am assuming that the officer cited you for a violation of Texas Code § 544.007 TRAFFIC-CONTROL SIGNALS IN GENERAL, which states in pertinent part, "(d) An operator of a vehicle facing only a steady red signal shall stop at a clearly marked stop line." Perhaps it has been this officer's practice to issue citations to people because they are a little over the line and then these people just pay them thinking they have actually broken the law. However, if you were to plead "not guilty" by going to a hearing over this, you would want to argue that you were not in violation of the statute at all because you technically were stopped "at" the line. "At" in this case is extremely vague and can be interpreted to mean just stopped period. It does not say "before" the line. If you do go before the judge on this, the officer has to be present or you automatically win by default. Many times, the officer is working at the time your hearing is scheduled or if it's his day off, he has better things to do than go to court. I would say in practice that about half the time, the officers do not even show up. The other thing you can do is look for a traffic citation law firm that will charge a couple hundred bucks to go to court over this for you. Many of these firms guarantee that if they don't get you out of your ticket, you won't have to pay them. Because there have been so many cut backs in government, if the officer that wrote you the ticket sees that you have an attorney who is going to represent you, the practice has been for them not even to come to court. In fact, in many departments, this is now the official policy. That is because the government cannot even waste the money or man hours trying to fight things like traffic tickets. If you or an attorney wins your case in front of the judge, it will be like you never got the ticket--you won't have any points assessed on your license and you won't have to pay any fine. Of course, using an attorney will probably cost more than the fine, but it will mean that 1) you won't have to appear in court yourself, 2) you won't have any points assessed on your license, and 3) it almost automatically guarantees that you will get out of your ticket. The choice is up to you but I think you have a very good chance of beating this either way! Best of luck with this!

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P.S.--I just realized what your user ID name said. You go! GB!