Whether you should attend the hearing in person depends on whether you believe that you will make a better impression in person than in writing. Only you can decide that, perhaps with the help of people who know you well.

It’s annoying how they don’t describe the burden of proof. Presumably it’s preponderance of the evidence… just says “by producing sufficient evidence” in the CMR. (211 CMR 74.00).

Cheers.

There is certainly precedent for appealing a fault finding in a single-vehicle accident. However, like I said, there is an extremely high burden of proof in such accidents to overturn the original finding of fault.

I didn’t mean fault finding.

My argument is that the road condition and weather accumulate to over 50% fault, thus my fault is less than 50%, so go away SDIP. I’m just not sure if there is any precedent in appealing fault for single vehicle matters.

Thank you for your reply; notably the burden of proof language.

I’m not very optimistic but $50 is worth spending for the potential upside.

In any case, if there are no other vehicles involved in an accident, then you can obviously be found more than 50% at fault and have points added to your insurance. If there’s no one to share the blame with, then any fault makes you more than 50% at fault.

To successfully appeal, you would have to argue that you were driving with reasonable care given what you knew about the road and weather conditions, and that the accident was caused by circumstances beyond your control that you could not have reasonably anticipated. It’s much harder to make that argument for a single-vehicle accident, since almost by definition, if you got into a single-vehicle accident, you weren’t driving with reasonable care.

The road was porous and scarred up and during a rainstorm, I was under speed limit but still lost control and damaged my car. Considering an appeal.

Cop on the scene didn’t give me any citations.