NC Traffic Law Blog

A Voluntary Dismissal is basically the court’s way of saying that they are not going to be moving forward with a citation, or a case against a defendant. People contact our office all the time asking if we can obtain a dismissal of their speeding citation or any other type of citation that they may have received. While we wish we could get a dismissal for every single one of our clients, we have to be very honest and straightforward - dismissals are only available in certain very limited circumstances, and because of that we cannot look at a dismissal as being something that is often or readily available as an outcome for our clients.

As I said, a dismissal is the State saying that they are not going to be moving forward with a citation or a case against the defendant. They’re basically saying “listen, we don’t have enough evidence or you’ve already significantly complied with whatever the requirements of the State were that led to the issuance of this citation.”

The benefits of a dismissal are threefold.

1. First, when a case is dismissed it doesn’t show up on your driving record. So while there is a notation of that case in the court computer system, it doesn’t show up as a negative mark on your driving record.
2. Secondly, there is no insurance consequence for a citation once it has been dismissed. Once the court throws a case out, the insurance companies cannot use that case against you, and thus there is no insurance consequence to a dismissal.
3. Finally, there are no court costs and fines involved when a case is dismissed. If the case is thrown out, you don’t owe anything to the court.

So a dismissal is a really good option or outcome available to our clients in certain circumstances because it does not cause any driving record impact or insurance impact, and it also doesn’t lead to the issuance of any court costs and fines.

Now with those benefits outlined, we have to turn our attention to the fact that dismissals are only obtainable in a very limited set of circumstances. For the most part we’re looking at a dismissal being an option in what is called a compliance case. “Compliance” means that there is a certain requirement that the State may have - whether that is that you have to maintain sufficient insurance on your vehicle, that you have to have an updated registration for your vehicle, or that you need to have an inspection for your vehicle. When looking at these compliance issues, the State’s main goal is just that you get in compliance. They don’t really want to take your license because your car registration was out of date by three days, all they want to do is make sure you get your registration updated. So if you are able to get your registration updated, then you come to our office with documentation of that and we have ammunition to go to the court and say, “listen our client has complied with the State’s requirement in this case, so please dismiss this citation.”

Oftentimes, a dismissal is something that we can work towards in these compliance cases, but it does take the court and the District Attorney being willing to allow a dismissal before one can be granted. There is still a negotiation process, and we still do have to present evidence to the District Attorney in order to be able to get a dismissal out of a compliance matter. It’s not just an open-and-shut case. With that being said, compliance cases are ones where a dismissal is something we would be working towards as our primary option for resolving such citations.

With regards to speeding tickets, they are oftentimes not eligible for a dismissal. As a rule, a speeding ticket is not going to be dismissed in North Carolina. Now, there are a hundred counties in NC and there are certain counties where the speeding ticket may be dismissed if certain circumstance are present in that particular case, but that is the exception - it is not the rule. The rule is that speeding citations in NC almost are never dismissed.