#law

Red light cameras are nowhere near as popular as they once were with Golden State municipalities. Loma Linda and Whittier became the most recent examples of California cities unplugging their automated ticketing machines after noting that the devices both failed to reduce accidents and generate the promised amounts of revenue.

The bailout of GM and Chrysler was nothing compared to the giant TARP thrown to bankers and brokerages, or so the argument goes. A panel of constitutional experts, convened at a Stanford Law School conference about the constitution and bailouts, has a totally different opinion: Bank rescue o.k., car rescue not o.k.

The top cop in the city of Washington, Missouri admitted last week that there is no evidence that red light cameras have made a change for the better. Police Chief Kenneth W. Hahn compiled accident information from 36 months prior to camera installation for comparison with 33 months of after data. The results were not favorable.

“It is impossible to determine if the cameras have had an obvious impact on safety since prevention is an intangible outcome; in other words we don’t know if we prevented an accident or not because it didn’t happen,” Hahn wrote. “We can only look at the raw data and if the impact is significant, then it is an obvious result. Provided the next three months of anticipated accidents are included for an accurate comparison, it is my opinion the three year red light camera program has had little, if any, impact on the overall safety of the two intersections.”

A civil rights think tank on Friday urged Albemarle County, Virginia to cancel its red light program. In a letter to county supervisors, the Rutherford Institute made the case that the contract the county entered into with Australian vendor Redflex Traffic Systems violates the law and will likely not achieve the stated goal of reducing accidents.

“The Redflex contract incorporates a so-called ‘cost-neutrality’ provision whereby the company’s compensation, up to the amount of the contractual monthly fee, hinges on the number of violations or monetary penalties imposed,” the group’s president, John W. Whitehead, wrote. “Regardless of how the fee arrangement is worded or structured, it is likely to be found in violation of Virginia law where the vendor has a financial incentive to ensure that a high number of citations are issued.”

A veteran district court judge in Herford, Germany was ordered this week not to hear traffic cases after he dared question whether speed camera citations are being issued merely as a means of generating revenue. Judge Helmut Knoner faces two criminal charges for acquitting forty-two motorists last month after noting that the automated ticketing machines lacked a solid legal foundations and appeared to be installed by authorities with questionable motives.

“Many cities and municipalities are feeling the pressure of empty coffers and earn good money with photo radar,” Knoner stated.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Tuesday reaffirmed a decision handed down in January ( read decision) limiting the ability of police to taser motorists over minor traffic violations. Coronado, California Police Officer Brian McPherson blasted motorist Carl Bryan, then 21, with a 1200-volt taser during a traffic stop over a minor infraction on the Coronado Bridge near San Diego, five years ago. Bryan lost four of his front teeth and was hit with “resisting arrest” charges. He sued, claiming excessive force had been used.

“We concluded that Officer Brian MacPherson used excessive force when, on July 24, 2005, he deployed his X26 taser in dart mode to apprehend Carl Bryan for a seatbelt infraction, where Bryan was obviously and noticeably unarmed, made no threatening statements or gestures, did not resist arrest or attempt to flee, but was standing inert twenty to twenty-five feet away from the officer,” Judge Kim Wardlaw summarized.

Both Toyota and the remains of its joint venture known as NUMMI have sued the remains of “Old GM” for breach of contract according to two separate reports in the Wall Street Journal [sub]. NUMMI is seeking $365m, claiming GM caused the collapse of the joint venture by unilaterally pulling out as it collapsed into bankruptcy, sticking Toyota and NUMMI with the bill.

Those decisions breached … commitments to Nummi and sounded its death knell,” said the lawsuit, filed last week. And unlike Toyota, GM’s bankruptcy estate “has refused to contribute to Nummi’s deficit during the wind down”

Toyota, meanwhile, is suing for some $73m in development costs for the Pontiac Vibe, a vehicle that GM was supposed to sell for another two years.

The Ohio Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that police do not need to obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to anyone’s vehicle. The case arose after paid informants told the Butler County Sheriff’s Office that Sudinia Johnson was involved in selling cocaine. Acting on this information, Detective Mike Hackney attached a pager-sized GPS tracker to the undercarriage of Johnson’s white Chevy van.

The GPS unit uploaded information regarding the van’s location to a website that Hackney regularly checked. This information was used to follow the van from Chicago back to Ohio, with police prepared to make a traffic stop with drug-sniffing canines as soon as Johnson entered Butler County, as long as “they were able to find probable cause to make a stop,” according to Hackney’s testimony.

A federal lawsuit seeks damages against a rental car company for allowing the photo enforcement firm American Traffic Solutions (ATS) to place charges on the credit cars of customers without their consent. North Carolina resident Dwight Simonson filed the case in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey earlier this year and hopes it will be certified as a class action. Simonson had rented a Hertz automobile in Orlando, Florida on June 23, 2009 and was outraged to find himself being billed $10.75 by ATS for a 75 cent toll. Since 2005, the New Jersey-based Hertz Corporation has worked with ATS through a program known as PlatePass through which renters can use toll roads with a built-in payment system. Frequent travelers have expressed outrage over the automatic billing for various forms of traffic fines they consider excessive. Simonson argues that the program is intended to defraud renters.

A federal judge issued an order last Friday blocking the immediate removal of red light cameras from Houston, Texas intersections. On November 2, voters adopted an amendment to the city charter making photo tickets unenforceable, against the wishes of the Houston city council and the private vendor that operates the cameras, American Traffic Solutions (ATS). Over the Thanksgiving holiday, US District Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Lynn N. Hughes worked out a deal with the city and ATS to preserve the cameras, for now.

A divided federal court last week ruled that police could not use GPS devices to track a suspect without first obtaining a warrant. Nine judges of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit considered the case of Antoine Jones who had been arrested on October 24, 2005 for drug possession after police attached a tracker to Jones’s Jeep — without judicial approval — and used it to follow him for a month.

Red light cameras are no longer issuing tickets to motorists in America’s fourth-largest city. The Houston, Texas city council on Monday canvassed the results of the November 2 vote and ordered the cameras unplugged. In the nearby city of Baytown, red light cameras will be disabled at midnight on November 26.

“The voting public has spoken,” Houston City Attorney David M. Feldman wrote Monday in a letter to Jim Tuton, CEO of the camera contractor American Traffic Solutions (ATS). “Houston must follow the mandate of the electorate. Houston hereby terminates its contract with ATS. This termination is effective immediately. ATS is required to turn off all red light cameras installed and/or monitored by reason of the contract and ATS is to do so immediately.”

A motorist filed a federal lawsuit against Chicago, Illinois police officers who issued twenty-four bogus parking tickets against him over the course of fourteen months. The tickets arrived in groups of three and four and were for violations that frequently contradicted one another, requiring the vehicle to be in more than one place at a time. Mark Geinosky suspects they conspired against him to extract revenge on behalf of his ex-wife.

“Plaintiff alleges that he received tickets for violations which never occurred, and which the defendant officers knew had not occurred, as part of a deliberate campaign by officers in Unit 253 to harass him,” Geinosky’s lawyer wrote in a brief to the court. “Plaintiff was forced, over and over again, to respond to bogus parking tickets which the defendant officers gave him for malicious reasons.”

A veteran district court judge in Herford, Germany earlier this month dismissed 42 speed camera citations on the grounds that they were not issued for any legitimate safety purpose. Judge Helmut Knoner blasted the use of cameras that has turned into a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry.

“Speed cameras are often a big rip-off,” Knoner said. “There is no law that regulates when, where and how measurements are made. For me, the reasonable suspicion is that cities, counties and police authorities only want to make money.”

A federal appellate court ruled Tuesday that a portion of a lawsuit against the red light camera and speed camera program in Cleveland, Ohio could proceed. Daniel McCarthy and Colleen Carroll argued that the city had unconstitutionally deprived them of their property after the Parking Violations Bureau fined them $100 when the municipal traffic camera ordinance did not give the city any authority to impose a fine on someone who leases his vehicle. A district court judge threw out the case, but the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit found merit in the state law aspects of their argument.