Is That Legal?

Nevada (or at least, so I am told Las Vegas) has some similar shennanigans.

We were passing through and stopped to have lunch with a friend. I asked her about all the, "we'll go to court for your ticket" billboards (in Calif. you can't get a lawyer for infractions, only for misdemeanors, e.g. doing 125 in a 65 zone, and; perforce, felonies).

She said that if you get a ticket, you hire a lawyer, and he noegotiates a deal.

Which is a way they make money off of people passing through, because they don't know, so they just pay the freight.

Just be glad it's not no fault insurance. When I lived in NC, my car insurance was less than $700 a year. Here in Michigan, it's over $1100!! And that's with a discount from the ABA. This no fault system is a bunch of bull. Plus in Michigan they require you to have some absurd amount of insurance in case you damage state property.

Eric,

I've been pushing your point for several years. We should either have speeding rules which have some meaning and treat them accordingly, or we should turn the whole mess into some Administrative Bureau.

Speeding cases just clog up the District Court docket and make it that much more difficult to deal properly with serious (lower-level) misbehavior. Of course there are a number of lawyers who make their livings doing nothing else and would be very upset if the system were improved.

Barry

I suppose obeying the law never occured to you?

ELM: What is this "obeying the law" of which you speak?

I thought that modern traffic laws as actually enfored were simply a means for providing random checks of people. Something that would be impossible without these warrantless stops. If you don't violate some traffic law over a reasonable driving distance then that's strange. Scrupulous adherence to the traffic law is "suspicious". Either way the police can stop anyone they want and require presentation of ID.

elliottg might be fascinated to know there's a case pending in Orange County right now in which part of the officer's "reasonable and articulable suspicion" for the stop is that the Defendant was driving at "exactly the speed limit."

I am not making that up.

Barry

I suspect Wyoming is the exception rather than the rule.

Hmmm... "obeying the law."

Oddly enough, I have been carefully obeying the speed laws on my local streets and highways since I was stopped for speeding awhile back.

When I was pulled over for speeding -- and I was, the officer clocked me at 10 miles over the posted speed limit on the highway -- I was moving with the flow of traffic, driving "too fast" but safely, with no apparent potential to become the cause of an accident (I asked the officer about that).

Since then, I have been scrupulously observing the speed limit and I have been damn near killed about three times each month -- because I am driving too slowly compared to everyone else.

My experiment has persuaded me that driving at exactly the legal posted limit, even in the slowest lane of traffic, is unsafe because it is too slow for conditions ... the condition in question being that almost everyone else is driving 10-20 mph faster.

It's disturbing to hear that driving at exactly the posted limit is also grounds for being stopped.

Is there any behavior that wouldn't be?

I think traffic laws are often applied randomly (at best) and I suspect they are frequently used to generate revenue.

With kind regards,
Dog, &c.
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