Jameson Stone Law handles traffic citations across Central Pennsylvania, and Ethan Stone leads the DUI and traffic work. A summary traffic offense is a criminal charge rather than a bill, which matters because the most common way people are convicted of one is by paying it without realising that is what they were doing.
The Ticket
Traffic citations in Pennsylvania are summary criminal offenses, prosecuted in the magisterial district court. Mailing in the payment enters a plea of guilty on your behalf. No hearing takes place, nobody looks at whether the citation was properly issued, points are assigned to your record, and the conviction sits there afterward doing whatever it is going to do to your insurance.
There is a route out of that, and it is short. A summary conviction can be appealed to the Court of Common Pleas within thirty days, and the appeal produces a fresh trial rather than a review of what happened below. Most people never find out that exists, because the citation is designed to read like an invoice rather than a charge.
Points
The system escalates in stages. The first time you reach six points, you get written notice and have to sit a special written examination, and passing it removes two points. The second time you reach six, there is a departmental hearing that can impose a fifteen day suspension. The third time, that hearing can impose thirty days. At eleven points or more, suspension is automatic, and the length runs at five days per point for a first suspension and ten for a second.
Two details cut the other way. Points come off at three for every twelve consecutive months without a violation. And once a suspension has been served and the license restored, the record shows five points regardless of what it showed before. Which is why the useful question is never whether a ticket is worth the fine, but what a conviction on it does to the arithmetic.
Driving Under Suspension
There are two versions of this offense and the gap between them is enormous. Driving while suspended for something other than a DUI is a summary offense carrying a fine and further suspension time. There is no mandatory jail until a sixth conviction, at which point the minimum becomes thirty days.
Driving while suspended for a DUI is different. It carries a mandatory sixty days in county jail on a first offense, a fine, and another full year of suspension on top. That applies whether the suspension came from a conviction or was imposed as a condition of ARD. A summary traffic offense with mandatory incarceration attached is not something most people see coming. What is worth knowing is that the Commonwealth has to establish you actually had notice the suspension was in effect, and that is not always as tidy in the file as it looks in the citation.
What We Handle
Citations where the points matter far more than the fine, and where the arithmetic decides everything.
Charges under either provision, including the DUI-related version that carries a mandatory sixty day jail term.
Appealing a summary conviction to the Court of Common Pleas, where the case is tried fresh.
Where a conviction reaches the commercial license and, with it, the job attached to that license.
Our Process
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What the citation carries, what your record already shows, and whether a conviction would push you over a suspension threshold.
The window from a summary conviction is short, and filing it preserves a fresh trial rather than a paper review.
A reduction to a lower point violation is usually worth more than the fine itself, and it is frequently available.
The fine on a traffic citation is rarely the expensive part. What the conviction does to the points on your record, and what the points then do to your license and your insurance, is where the actual cost sits. Those are separate questions from whether you were speeding.
You can, and it ends the matter in the sense that nobody will chase you. What it also does is enter a guilty plea to a criminal offense and put points on your record. Whether that matters depends entirely on what is already there. Two points on a clean record is not worth a fight. Two points on a record sitting at nine is the difference between driving and not driving, and paying that citation would be the most expensive thing you did that month. The answer is the same either way: find out where your record stands before you decide.
Eleven triggers an automatic suspension. Six triggers intervention short of that, escalating each time you reach it, from a written examination to a departmental hearing to a suspension of up to thirty days. Drivers under eighteen face suspension at six points rather than eleven. And after any suspension is served, your record restarts at five points regardless of where it was, which is worth factoring in rather than assuming a clean slate.
It can matter a great deal, because the Commonwealth has to prove you had notice. Suspension notices are mailed, and people move, or the notice arrives while they are away, or it goes to an address PennDOT has and they do not. That is a real defense rather than an excuse, and it is worth raising before anything is entered, particularly where the suspension was DUI-related and mandatory jail is attached to the charge. Whether it succeeds depends on what the file actually shows about the mailing.
Paying the citation is the decision, and it is made the moment the payment goes in. Whether it is the right one depends on what your record already shows, which takes a few minutes to establish and cannot be undone afterward. Ethan Stone leads the firm’s DUI and traffic work, and the first conversation costs nothing.