Orange County Driving Offenses Attorney

Four charges make up most of what walks through our door, and they are not equally serious.

There are four sections, and which one you are charged under changes everything:

All four are misdemeanors and all four put two points on your DMV record.

A 14601.2 conviction carries a mandatory minimum of 10 days in county jail and a fine starting at $300 plus penalty assessments. If you have a qualifying prior within five years, the minimum jumps to 30 days in the Orange County Jail and a fine starting at $500 plus assessments. Those minimums are written into the statute. A judge does not get to waive them.

Every one of these sections also requires the prosecutor to prove you knew your license was suspended. That element is where these cases are won, and it is missing from most of the competing pages you will read on this subject.

VC 12500 is a wobblette, meaning it can be charged as a misdemeanor or as an infraction. It carries zero points. That last fact is the single most useful thing on this page, and we will come back to it.

VC 23103 is driving with willful or wanton disregard for safety. If someone other than the driver is injured, it becomes VC 23104, which carries not less than 30 days and not more than six months in county jail, or a fine of $220 to $1,000, or both. A scraped knee is enough to get you there.

VC 20002 is a misdemeanor carrying two points. Note what the crime actually is. It is not the collision. It is leaving without identifying yourself. That distinction matters more than you would expect, and we explain why below.

Most defense pages talk about getting a charge “reduced” as though all reductions are the same. They are not. On these cases there is one specific move, and it is worth understanding why.

A 14601 conviction is two points. A 12500 conviction is zero points, and it can be knocked further down to an infraction. So moving a client from 14601 to 12500 does not just lighten a sentence. It takes them off the DMV’s negligent operator ladder entirely.

What gets you there is not an argument in court. It is homework done before the negotiation. Bryan’s practice on these is to work with the client to get a valid California license in hand first, and only then open the conversation with the District Attorney. When that happens, the usual landing spot is a 12500. Most of the time the case is dismissed outright. Worst case, it comes down to a 12500 charged as an infraction.

So if your license is suspended and you can clear the underlying hold, do it now, before your court date. A prosecutor looking at a defendant who has already fixed the problem is a different prosecutor than the one looking at a defendant who has not.

One thing that is different here from most criminal charges in Orange County: on suspended license, unlicensed driving and hit and run cases, outcomes do not vary much between the Harbor, Central, West and North Justice Centers. On DUI and on several other charges, the courthouse genuinely matters. On these, the prosecutors work with you at all four.

If your license was suspended because of a DUI conviction and you were caught driving, you are looking at VC 14601.2, and you should know going in that this is treated differently here.

Read that carefully, because it is an honest answer rather than a marketing one. On a 14601.2 the realistic win is usually not a dismissal and usually not a zero point charge (although we always fight for the zero point charge or dismissal). It is getting off the mandatory jail sentence. That is still a substantial result. It is just not the result the rest of these pages imply is available.

Several Orange County defense pages still tell you that a hit and run can be resolved by civil compromise under Penal Code 1377, meaning you pay the other driver, they tell the court they are satisfied, and the case goes away.

That has not been the law since 2019. In People v. Dimacali (2019) 32 Cal.App.5th 822, the Court of Appeal applied the California Supreme Court’s holding in People v. Martinez (2017) 2 Cal.5th 1093 that the act constituting a 20002(a) offense is fleeing the scene, not the collision. Because the crime is the leaving, there is no matching civil claim to compromise. The property damage is a separate thing.

If you are reading a page that still offers you civil compromise on a hit and run, that page has not been updated in six years.

What does still work is paying restitution early and judicial diversion under Penal Code 1001.95. In our experience a 20002(a) misdemeanor is usually fixable. It gets dismissed, or it comes down to a benign charge, and what does it is restitution paid up front, or paid through the Orange County District Attorney’s Victim Witness office as a condition of diversion.

Two things kill that outcome, and both are worth knowing before you call anybody:

1. No insurance, and no ability to pay restitution out of pocket. If the damage figure is too large for the client to cover, there is nothing to work with. Bryan calls this an outright deal killer.
2. A long driving record. A history riddled with unlicensed driving, suspended license convictions, hit and runs or DUIs takes the compromise off the table.

Your criminal case and your driving privilege are two separate proceedings on two separate clocks. Most people find this out too late.

The DMV runs the Negligent Operator Treatment System, and it counts points, not convictions. Their published thresholds are:

That suspension takes effect 34 days after the DMV mails the order.

Now look at the point values again. A DUI is two points. Any of the four suspended license sections is two points. A hit and run misdemeanor is two points. Two of those inside twelve months and you are at the suspension threshold. A 12500 is zero, which is why the reduction described above is worth as much as it is.

Two things about these hearings that no competitor page mentions:

The DMV does not wait for your conviction.

And if the court case goes away, the DMV action does not go with it. Getting your criminal case dismissed is not a defense at the DMV. It is a separate hearing, on a separate record, and it has to be fought separately. We handle those hearings when we are retained on the related vehicular criminal case.

A large share of the people who call us are not calling about a fresh citation. They are calling because they ignored one, and something has now happened.

What happens next depends on whether the original citation was a misdemeanor or an infraction, and the two outcomes are not remotely alike.

If it was a misdemeanor, the court can issue a bench warrant. That warrant does not expire on its own and it sits there until somebody deals with it. If you failed to appear on a citation you signed, the prosecutor can also add a charge under VC 40508.

If it was an infraction, there is no warrant. Warrants exist on misdemeanors and felonies. What you get instead is a hold placed on your license and a $100 civil assessment added under Penal Code 1214.1, on top of the original bail amount. The Orange County Superior Court also refers unpaid cases to an outside collection agency and can intercept your tax refund.

On the warrant, the practical question is whether you have to walk into a courtroom and risk being taken into custody. Usually you do not. We go in without you, put the case back on calendar, have the warrant recalled and set it for a pretrial so negotiations can start.

How fast that happens: we were hired on a Wednesday on a Harbor Justice Center matter and were in court Thursday. The warrant was recalled the next day after being hired and the client never appeared.

On misdemeanor driving cases generally, we appear on your behalf and you stay at work. That is standard for us on these, not an exception we make for certain clients.

Every other page you will read on this subject is built to make you feel like you need a lawyer. Here is where we think that is not true.

Infractions are not crimes. They carry no jail, you cannot be arrested for them, and they carry one point. That includes:

• Failure to wear a seatbelt
• Holding a phone while driving
• Speeding under VC 22349 or VC 22350

Bryan’s answer when someone calls wanting to hire the firm on one of these:

So: clean record, no injury, no priors, straightforward infraction. Ask the court for traffic school if you are eligible and have not used it in the last 18 months. That gets the point off, though you still pay the fine and the traffic school fee. If it is a non-moving violation, just pay it and move on. There is nothing there for a lawyer to improve.

Call us when the box says misdemeanor, when there is an injury, when there is a collision you left, when your record has priors on it, or when you are not sure which of those you are looking at.

“It’s just a traffic ticket.” This is the mistake that creates the cases we end up fixing. A citation is a notice to appear. On a misdemeanor, that piece of paper is a criminal charge, and it does not stop being one because you decided it looked minor.

“I’ll just pay it and be done.” On a misdemeanor charge, paying is not settling a bill. It is resolving a criminal case, and what you are left with is a criminal conviction on your record.

“The citation says infraction, so I’m fine.” Covered at the top of this page. The citation is not the filing decision.

“They can’t prove I knew about the suspension.” Sometimes true, and it is the element that wins these cases. But the DMV keeps mailing records, and the prosecutor will use them. This is an argument to make with a lawyer, not an assumption to rely on.