What You Need to Know About PJCs
Most people have heard of them but very few people really know what they mean under different circumstances. Here we discuss some of the finer points of PJCs.
PJC stands for prayer for judgment continued. Most often you hear people refer to a PJC in reference to a traffic case. The law surrounding PJCs is complicated and frequently misunderstood, often even by lawyers. There are times when we have clients who believe that they would benefit from a PJC when in fact it would hurt them. For example clients with commercial licenses should just plain steer clear of them. We also have clients who believe that a PJC will keep their insurance from going up but they did not realize that somebody else on their insurance policy had already used one within the last three years. You only get one PJC every three years per insurance policy for the purposes of your car insurance. In other instances, people believe that they should almost always use a PJC. Since you only get a limited number, you need to protect them like any other precious resource. Before we resort to using a prayer for judgment we always look to see that there are not other options available.
It really starts to get confusing when you then consider the fact that you get two PJCs every five years for DMV purposes if you have a standard class C driver’s license. This comes into play when trying to save someone’s license if they got a ticket while they were revoked.
There are times when PJC’s come up in regular criminal cases as well. A long time ago a PJC in a criminal case like an assault would not count as a prior conviction. That is no longer the case. Now a PJC is, in many respects the same as a regular conviction. However, many employers do still treat them differently and look upon them more favorably than a conviction.
Occasionally we have clients who ask us whether we can get them a PJC on their DWI. By law, judges are not permitted to grant prayer for judgment on DWIs.
Our traffic lawyers help people throughout Wake County, North Carolina. We frequently handle offenses arising out of the following cities: Morrisville, Cary, Apex, Raleigh, Garner, Zebulon, Holly Springs, Rolesville, New Hope, Wake Forest, Wendell, Knightdale and Fuquay-Varina.
