I am 34 and have never gotten a ticket. This morning, 5:30 AM while going to work in a heavy ice fog, I saw the yellow light. I started to brake, the wheels slipped, so I just accelerated through the intersection. I knew it was going to be close, but I thought I entered on yellow (legal in Alaska).

Anyway, cop pulls me over and says I ran a red light. When he gave me the ticket I said I thought I had entered on yellow. He said, "No, you missed it by a little less than two car lengths".

At first I thought, well okay, he should know -- that is until I did the math and read the ticket. Ticket has wrong zip code, he asked for my phone # but forgot to write it in, he failed to check the box for Municipal Code or Statute or Hazardous Material violation (left them blank but did cite a Code #. He put a line next to optional court date, but failed to check the box, just a line outside the box. His citation read "Failure to stop stedy red", which hardly seems appropriate. On the signature line he abbreviated Officer OFC and printed his last name. The writing is almost illegible on the ticket.

Mathematically, if I was going 40 mph, that means I was going about 60 feet/sec. If I missed it by two car lengths (30 feet), he had 1/2 a second to determine that the light had changed and that I was not in the intersection. The roads were snow covered so the stop line is obscured. Visibility was less than 1/4 mile due to the ice fog.

I honesty do not know if I was in the intersection on yellow or not -- I thought I was. I guess I have hard time taking his word for it because of the obvious innativeness to detail he showed in filling out the ticket. I mean, if he wrote the ticket so slopily and with such poor attention to detail, why should I believe he made a split-second decision correctly?

Is this a valid argument or will I get killed in traffic court?