Our law takes the view that it is reasonable for you to know who has use of your registered vehicle. And that (I suppose, technically, on pain of being charged with perjury) you can be asked to give evidence as to who you allowed to have use of the vehicle at the time of the event. If whoever it is denies it, but has no alibi, a jury (hypothetically) might draw its own conclusions. Won’t ever happen, this stuff does not get to juries. But the principle of having material information and being compelled under oath to give evidence or remain silent remains. In UK there are, among others perhaps, two consequences of retaining your right to silence (a) you may not rely on something later in court if you remain silent about it during questioning and (b) for these speeding offences, you end up taking the rap unless you can show it was not you and provide some plausible, at least, alternative. Otherwise everyone would always say “it was not me” and get away with speeding without the consequences. The roads would be a metaphorical “wild west” (as they used to be when there were far fewer cars and far more traffic police). It is a balance our society has chosen over having too many reckless speeding drivers and not enough traffic police, but plenty of funds for cameras. Not saying I agree, but it is the balance we have chosen.
@Enkita - as I said, here in UK pretty much all speed cameras (and traffic light cameras too, I am pretty sure) take pictures from behind the vehicle. Motor-cylists are treated equally before the law as a result.
Which may be why we have this “name names” law.
I suspect the case cited by the Guardian was in all likelihood over-ruled very quickly but the two appellants did not like it so spent six years pursuing it through successive courts until the EHC finally said “enough!”. Would need to do more research re what happened at each level, but there are a few levels between Crown Court and EHC, hence elapsed time
Identifying the driver seems an overreach and unnecessary. When we had cams here in NJ, the summons was similar to a parking ticket, issued to the car. Who paid it was the owners problem, just like a parking ticket. But there were no points or insurance repercussions. This was still a deterrence, but the anti-cam forces got them removed anyway and ignoring lights and stop signs is a way of life here.
Don’t get me started on things like why don’t they ticket for obscured license plates. People drive around with dirty plastic over their plates and cops do nothing.
I did a lot of web research on traffic cams when I got a $500 red light ticket in San Francisco. I learned a lot that made me question the reasoning for these cams:
The vast majority of these tickets are not for the highly dangerous action of rolling straight through a red light, but rather for making a prohibited right turn on red, which is a much safer thing to do.
These cams are an attractive nuisance for municipalities. Even if the original intention is safety, their budgets and priorities end up being shaped by the steady stream of cash.
These cameras are operated under a “deal with the devil” where the municipality agrees to pay penalties to the company that installed them if they don’t ensnare enough victims. This perverse incentive causes all sorts of cheating around the edges like adjusting timing of yellow lights shorter to stay in compliance.
You are always presumed guilty and have to prove that the photograph does not match your face in order to get out of the ticket. Moreover, when the match is marginal, the benefit of the doubt always goes to the municipality, for an action that is charged as a criminal violation on the driving record.
A large portion of municipalities have taken down the cameras for these and other reasons.
In my case I paid the ticket and an extra $300 bond to ensure my presence in court, where I asked for and got a reduction in the ticket to about $300. The process required multiple visits and waits in lines at the courthouse.
I would support red light cameras if they could only catch people who go straight through the intersection, but they wouldn’t be cost effective for the municipalities. I can’t support red light cameras supported by unproportionate fines for people who do the relatively safe thing of making prohibited right turns.
Nobody mentioned statements about events not witnessed.
[quote=“anothernewbbaccount, post:41, topic:92987”]
who you allowed to have use of the vehicle at the time of the event
[/quote] is not saying “that person was in the car and driving at the time of the event, but I did not see it” and thus is not hearsay.
(“On Friday, Fred (could have) had the car” is not the same as saying “At 4pm on Friday at the location specified, Fred was in the car and driving it.”)
Thus, such a satement merely gives rise to reasonable suspicion that the named person may have been driving at the time and rightly subjects them to further questioning on the subject. That is all.
ETA - got to drop offline for a while now and I’ve no more to say except I did wade through the text of the EHC judgement and it is interesting, if anyone really wants to get worked up / informed about how this legal stuff works in Europe. Lord Bingham, in particular seems to get to the heart of it. No speed-reading, now!
If we’re still talking about UK law, no, that’s not quite how it works. The keeper is not liable for the offence if they don’t identify the driver- they will be committing a separate offence of not identifying the driver.
This carries a penalty that’s slightly more severe than a minor speeding offence, but less severe than some of the other offences for which the keeper is required to identify the driver, e.g. vehicular manslaughter.
There is a defence if the keeper “shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was”.
A few things to think about:
I don’t want to get points on my license for not being able to prove I wasn’t driving my car at the time a traffic cam got a picture of it allegedly speeding.
This is another issue that disproportionately penalizes people (yaghh! Tongue twister!) who don’t have time or money to spend hours disputing a ticket.
There’s also the issue of tweaking traffic lights to become profit centers: https://www.motorists.org/blog/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
A couple of decades ago, the city of New Orleans tried to issue a traffic ticket to me for parking illegally. Trouble was, at that time I was attending school in Ohio, although I had driven the car in question to visit someone in NO a year prior. If I couldn’t prove I wasn’t in New Orleans the day the ticket was issued, how was I supposed to fight the ticket? Bonus round: how did they get my license plate number and attach it to a bogus ticket?
eta: I really don’t like the ‘guilty until proven innocent’ trope developing here.
“and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones”
Streets you think/hope are empty. People to whom speed limits are a joke are not going to give a damn about pedestrians stepping out.
And if driving thirty in a twenty five is OK, why not forty or fifty. The streets being empty as you opine, there realty is no need for an upper limit whatsoever since you seem to assert the driver is the ultimate arbiter of what speed he or she should do.
Feel free to demonstrate why going five over the limit is peachy but going fifty over the limit would not be… Where do you draw the line? To me, it is already drawn and it is called the speed limit.
Driving a ton and a half of metal and explosive liquids is a lot like firing a gun: There is never a time when you can just say “The law does not apply here, I shall do as I please as I am the best judge of what is safe.”.
Fines a very problematic way to deal with lack of legal compliance, and many places in the US are basically bringing back debtors prison.
Traffic offenses in general are seen a revenue streams rather than real offenses. Where I live at one point traffic tickets were down 20% and it was hurting city revenue. There was this back and forth between the politicians and the police about the cause (the politicians thought the police were issuing fewer tickets as a retaliation to budget cuts). Of course no one even imagined that tickets might be down because fewer people were violating traffic laws - it’s not remotely plausible.
I wish we set traffic laws appropriately to achieve whatever balance we feel ought to be achieved between speed of traffic and public safety; and I wish we treated them like real offenses culturally (like we do with drunk driving). Instead, they literally become randomly assigned cash grabs that occasionally remove people’s licences making them lose their jobs and then their homes. Hooray for randomly applied dystopianism.
Here’s your leprechaun ticket. You don’t have to pay if you can prove there aren’t any leprechauns.
So in usual Cory fashion when writing about legal issues, the BB piece and the headline accompanying it don’t accurately describe what happened. The judge ruled that this one particular ticket was invalidly issued, not that speeding cam tickets are illegitimate.
There have been cases where two possible drivers have refused to say which of them actually committed an offence, and got away with it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-35472617
The fine for failing to provide driver details wouldn’t be worth it for most speeding tickets though.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6251936.stm “The judges also pointed out that UK law made it clear that no offence has been committed if a car owner can prove that he or she did not know, and could not be expected to know, who was driving the vehicle.”
The last time we bought a car, we went without front plates for three months because we had to drill holes and never found the time to do it. We were always worried and we refused to drive through Signal Hill because they would have nailed us.
The funny thing is that the state sends two but I guess most people think the front plate is a suggestion. Or a possible replacement?
I don’t think they cite out of state, right? I mean states’ rights and all that.
