Maybe the driving is the key part there, because i can still hear external sounds just fine while listening to music through my earbuds while on the bus. If the music is loud, some sound can be blocked, but not if there’s no music.
As a cyclist, this story just makes me envious of British Columbia’s distracted driving laws. Folks ‘round here are texting on their phone when going through an intersection around a curve on a four-lane roadway. (That’s not an exaggeration. That’s an intersection I stop at a block from my work, and I watch people as they drive through it.)
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Because you didn’t even remember they were in there, which greatly detracts from the argument that they might be distracting you.
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the thing is if the headphones connect to the phone become part of the phone then when the headphones connect to him, does he become part of the headphones, do the headphones and phone also become part of him. or is he perhaps part of the phone.
In that case it may be that he was guilty of using himself while driving, which, J.G Ballard not withstanding, is really gross and should be punished.
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Why do these ridiculous contortions instead of just giving him a fine/warning/whatever they can for just the headphones, phone or not, turned on or not? That’s pretty much the equivalent of wearing earplugs while driving. Is that somehow not enough?
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They did. He took it to court. This is the court telling him his contesting of the ticket failed.
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By plugging the ear buds into his ears, the driver became the phone and everyone knows phones can’t drive. Therefore, there was no infraction.
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May not be in the linked article but was in the one I was reading about this earlier today: police said one ear bud is acceptable - so you can make calls.
My pet peeve is that driving for Uber and Lyft unavoidably requires violating hands-free laws in localities that prohibit touching cell phone screens while driving. If one of their drivers ended up in this judge’s courtroom someone would have a heart attack.
Does that mean you can’t drive when deaf?
This decision seems highly curious; but for slightly different reasons than highlighted:
TFA says:
Because the earbuds “were part of the electronic device and since the earbuds were in the defendant’s ears”, Adair concluded that “the defendant was holding the device (or part of the device) in a position in which it could be used, ie his ears.”
Unless the law specifically addresses hands-free/headset/etc. systems as being distinct from phones for the purpose of what ‘using a phone’ means in this context(in which case the law should say whether those cases are, aren’t, or are judged by different criteria, presumably provided; the conclusion that having headphones connected directly to a phone in your ears is a phone-using stance seems fairly reasonable.
But if everyone agrees that the phone was dead(and with an iPhone it’s not like he swiftly swapped in a dead battery before the cops could collect the evidence, that’s a fiddly operation); then I’m having a difficult time understanding why meditations on “what is ‘phone’, really?” would even come up when everyone agrees that phone was not in usable state.
If he’s guilty of anything it would be some restriction on how much attenuation(whether from headphones or purpose-build earplugs) drivers without auditory disabilities, who presumably are accustomed to having their sense of hearing to improve situational awareness, are allowed to use when operating a vehicle; but that would be unrelated to whether the in-ear components are connected to a dead phone or just 25 cents worth of yellow foam cylinder.
The judge’s logic doesn’t seem particularly wrongheaded; just orthogonal to the point: if the phone is dead it wouldn’t matter if universal oneness means that, in a sense, all things are the phone and the phone is all things; it’s not usable because it’s dead. If the actual violation the driver is in for is related to use of headphones/earplugs/attenuating devices; then it doesn’t much matter whether or not they are connected to a dead phone or not at the time.
Did our judge only philosophize halfway through the situation here? Peevish about the fact that the phone was probably not dead during an earlier leg of the journey and the defendant is sneaking away from justice because the battery died before the cops could get him?
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I think that is the most likely explanation and the judge should know better. That logic is out of bounds here. The cops don’t give you a speeding ticket because of the nearly certain chance you were speeding at some point.
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Canada draws a distinction between criminal and regulatory offences. Regulatory offences (which don’t result in a criminal record and are rarely punishable by jail) have a lot more latitude in the conduct they cover. They are generally constructed in ways that limit defences and sidestep arguments about whether the conduct was actually dangerous in those circumstances (although such arguments still have a place in sentencing). This generally wouldn’t be allowed in a criminal offence.
Consider another traffic charge like running a red light. You get the fine regardless of whether traffic was actually coming the other direction. With cell phones, the rule is that you don’t touch it. Period. There’s no debating about whether you were just moving it or it was in airplane mode or even that the battery is dead.
Apparently, the phone was being used. It was being used to fill up his ear holes. How it was in use is apparently irrelevant. If he was using the phone as a hammer to drive in a nail, it would be in use.
Oh, those aren’t earbuds. It’s just how I secure the phone to the driver.
“But sir, I wasn’t driving without a licence, I was merely using my phone”
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There appears to be a longstanding assumption that headphones make all external sounds utterly impossible to hear. It’s the logic used in movie scenes where people can’t hear gunfire because of their headphones. It’s not based in fact, logic, or intelligence, but these have never been a requirement for law.
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