Points Stay on for a Maximum of Five Years
Video Transcribed:
How does the driver’s license point system work in Oklahoma? I’m Tulsa Traffic Ticket Attorney, James Wirth, and we’re talking about the Department of Public Safety and tracking convictions on traffic offenses and how that affects insurance rates and potential loss of a driver’s license. All right. Any time you get a traffic citation in the state of Oklahoma, that is a charge that you’re being accused of. If you are convicted of it, then there’s a good chance that that conviction is tied to a certain assessment of points that go on your driver’s license.
There are 63 traffic offenses that the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety has in their appendix that have a point tied to them. Each one of them has anywhere from one to four points tied to it. When you get a conviction on that citation, the court clerk for whatever court that is, that citation is in, is required by law to give notice of that conviction to the Department of Public Safety. They then attach that to your driver’s license. Then when insurance companies are looking at your driving background, they get a copy of that information, and they utilize it in determining rates.
Points on your license mean higher rates. In some cases, points on your license or too many means you can’t get insured. Various companies will decide not to insure you. But additionally, you get too many points, you lose your driver’s license for a period of time. It’s suspended.
When do those things happen? Any amount of points can cause increased insurance costs. One point, two-point, anywhere like that. Once you get up to five points, the Department of Public Safety is going to send you a letter warning you about your accumulation of points.
Once you get to seven, eight, or nine points, they can have you come in and require an interview where you can talk about the issues that you’re having, and they could require a defensive driving course.
They could require you to provide medical, physical, and mental health records to determine that you are an appropriate driver. When you hit 10 points, your license is going to be suspended for a period of time, anywhere from 30 days to a year, depending on if you’ve had prior suspensions for that reason.
Points stay on for a maximum of five years, but they can come off quicker if you go through long periods of time without any citations or convictions. You can earn points back by doing a defensive driving course. That earns you two points back, but you can only do that once every two years.
That’s pretty much the basics of how that system works. There are some more intricacies to it for individual people. If you’ve got questions that are particular to you, a citation that you have, you may want to talk to an attorney about that. If you are facing a traffic violation in Oklahoma, you can go online to makelaweasy.com.
