#Law

The Appeals Court of Massachusetts last month confirmed the principle that a police officer has no more power than any other citizen outside of his legal jurisdiction. The decision came in the context of an August 4, 2006 incident where Joseph Limone was driving his Oldsmobile on Montvale Avenue in Woburn just past Interstate 93. Limone rear-ended the car in front of him, which just happened to be driven by a uniformed police officer.

According to AZfamily.com, Arizona’s controversial freeway speed cameras will come down this week, as a result of governor Jan Brewer’s decision to not renew the state’s contract with Redflex. In addition to public opposition to the cameras, a lack of revenue flowing to the state appears to have been a factor in the decision to shut down the cameras. Apparently, the cameras generated over 7,000 tickets in their first year of operations, but because so many motorists simply ignored the tickets and the state didn’t have enough process servers, only about $30m of the estimated $90m in fines that should have been generated by those tickets was actually paid to the state. Arizona’s freeway speed cameras should be deactivated by this Friday.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance and Drivers’ Alliance last week calculated that UK speed cameras issued £87,368,227 (US $131,256,380) worth of tickets in fiscal 2009 without any demonstrable safety benefit. Since speed cameras were first installed on British roads in 1991, the roads became more dangerous than they would have been without photo enforcement, according to the report.

Ohio’s second highest court on Thursday ruled that a constitutional challenge to photo enforcement should proceed. Attorney Jeffrey Posner had appealed a speed camera ticket he received from a private contractor operating in Cleveland on the grounds that the way the private firm handled the evidence undermined his right to due process. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Eight Appellate District found merit in his concerns and reversed the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court decision that previously had found no problem with the system of automated ticketing.

At a congressional hearing Wednesday, members expressed increasingly skeptical views toward the safety claims made by the usual cast of advocates for photo enforcement. The US House Transportation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit invited five representatives of the familiar groups that advocate expanded use of red light cameras and speed cameras. In presentations before the committee and written testimony, however, members seemed to be more swayed by what the two camera opponents that appeared had to say.

Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruled in September that speeding tickets issued on the basis of laser speed gun readings were not valid ( view decision). The high court followed up this ruling in March by overturning a case where the officer in question claimed he used pacing to estimate the speed after the laser evidence was thrown out ( view decision). Dozens of motorists convicted by lidar evidence are now being forced to take their case to the Intermediate Court of Appeals in order to clear their names.

The New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday expanded the ability of police to jail suspects for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) by allowing arrests to be made solely based on third-party tips. The ruling was handed down two weeks after the same court had relaxed DUI arrest rules so that motorists sleeping off a night of drinking in their automobiles would not be hit with the same penalty as if they had driven away ( read decision).

A woman driving between Texas and Montana was stopped in South Dakota for the crime of driving with too many cats. In the case known as “South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats,” that state’s highest court ruled Wednesday that the feline seizure was the appropriate response. On August 13, 2009 at around 11:15pm, a Pierre policeman had stopped Patricia Edwards as she was backing out of a parking spot. Edwards, broke, was living out of the car with fifteen cats and all of her personal belongings.

The city council in Mukilteo, Washington voted on Monday to reverse itself on the issue of photo enforcement. After over 1909 voters signed a petition to call for an election to ban red light cameras and speed cameras, council members began to have second thoughts about their contract with American Traffic Solutions (ATS) to operate automated ticketing machines. ATS also operates in the neighboring town of Lynnwood.

A red light camera company faces being fined for running an illegal operation in the state of South Dakota. Last Tuesday, a circuit court judge ruled that Redflex Traffic Systems and the city of Sioux Falls violated state law and the US Constitution when they set up automated ticketing machines without approval from the state legislature. The question of whether Redflex is financially liable, and to what degree, will now be determined by a jury.

Drivers in Georgia were hit for the first time last Friday with a new tax on speeding tickets designed to raise between $25 and $30 million in annual revenue for the general fund. The plan was modeled on the driver responsibility taxes in states like Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Texas. A similar plan in Virginia was so unpopular that legislators repealed the tax within six months and refunded all of the money that had been collected under the program.