What legally can I do?

[1996CHEVCamaro]

Alright this started out yesterday afternoon whenever my mom called me and asked me if I had ever recieved any tickets for not showing a valid license. She then tells me that she recieved a letter in the mail that stated that I owed money to the Texas DPS office of unpaid tickets.. In the past two years of driving I have been stopped twice, both for speeding in which I recieved a verbal and a written warning. So I knew that these tickets were not mine. But my mom was b****ing at me all day about lying to her so I told my mom to call the DMV at the town that I usually get my licenses re-newed at, and they just bluntly told her that I was lying to her and that I had gotten tickets and just never told her. Well this pissed me off so I went to the local DMV here where I go to college and they gave me a list of FOUR tickets that were issued to me in 12/03/03 and on 1/29/04 in a town that I had never been to. I was in highschool during those days. I called up my sheriffs office and told them about it and they told me that they would take care of it. It turned out that they had made a mistake and issued the tickets in my name but they were really issued to a guy that had the same name except that his middle name was Steve while mine is Steven. After this whole ordeal was kind of solved I got to thinking why should I have to put up with all this crap of the DPS, Is there anything Legal I can do to make sure this doesn't happen to me again?

[GrigoryRasputin]

Yeah, change your name.

[Everglades W68]

Originally posted by GrigoryRasputin:
Yeah, change your name.

I second that idea.

[pontiac nino]

Originally posted by GrigoryRasputin:
Yeah, change your name.

Señor Esteban! [img]smile.gif[/img]

[1996CHEVCamaro]

Well, I really think that would not be an option right now...seriously anyone have any advice that will help..the thing that bothers me is that the people did not take the time and make sure it was right and just left it f'ed up..and then the DPS office just calling me a lier and not helping out at all...should I contact a lawyer to make sure this will never happen again?

[pontiac nino]

In all seriousness, get a lawyer, yes. You should already know the way the Texas DPS is, they like to ruff up traffic violators. They're gonna give you crap till you find some sort of resolution w/ them. I know by crappy experiences. Do you have proof that they were warnings? I still have all my tickets even the warnings. BTW how much are the tickets for in total?

[1996CHEVCamaro]

It has already been declared that the Corsicana County made a mistake, I am wanting to know what I can do to make SURE this will never happen again and make them check their crap over again before they issue tickets to innocent people...if I would have not been in Highschool and have my attendance to back me up then I would probably have to pay the tickets and I think that is totally BS and I don't think I should have been told that I was lying before they even checked things out...basically I want to show them they can not just freak things up and I will let them get away with it...its not very easy trying to get your peers to trust you when they are being told that you are lying....

[chas]

ha. you got off easy. when i went to change my pa license to a va license they initially denied my request. apparently there is a charles a williams iii in north carolina (with a somewhat similar birthdate but different ssn) with a rather egregious history of dui. so my ssn was different and my middle name is different but this wasnt sufficient to convince (pre 9/11) virginia dmv that i wasnt charles a williams. (apparently, at the time, i could have just paid a couple hundred to someone in the parking to just get a new license under an assumed alias -- should have gone that route).

think john smith is common, check out charles williams in the phone book sometime.

[Everglades W68]

I am serious - If you have a name that is very close to someone who is getting in trouble with the law in your state, you should ask yourself how likely is it that this guy will continue getting in trouble? Plus, he probably has caught on that he can confuse the system and deflect his problems onto some other person (YOU).

You don't have to change the name to something completely different, but you could make it different enough that there won't be any confusion.

Yes, your name is inherently personal and it is you. But this other guy has nearly the same name and he knows people, being people, can be confused/misled.

What about if you start to get a bad credit rating because of this?

Go for a different middle name or something.

[ABH]

Seriously, outside of changing your name, by which I mean drop the middle name, or go by an initial, there is not much you can do.

Sure, you can find a lawyer and pay the guy $175+/hr, but a simple mistake of confusing Steve and Steven is really easy to make. I have a brother named Steven but we all call him Steve.

All you suffered in the end was embarrasment. So going to a lawyer will be a costly, and in the end, futile undertaking. Mistakes like that are far more common than you think. I get bills and letters that are addressed to my late father because we share the same first name.

Ask the guy who got buried with hundreds of tickets because the plate on his car said NO PLATE.

[BLLDOGG]

just brush it off and get on with your life

[T-Punk]

Change your name, hear is a good one to make sure you never get confused with anyone else "Armadilla Octavio Sanchez". look it up in the phone book but i doubt such a man exists. in reallity though there really isnt much you can do.