New York State’s message with respect to distracted driving (texting, navigating your Ipod, talking on the phone, etc) is clear–don’t do it.

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago (More Points For Cell Phone Tickets In NY) , Governor Cuomo had set his sights on toughening existing distracted driving laws. Tuesday, it became official.

The Governor signed a new law that strengthens the enforcement against the use of handheld electronic by a driver while a vehicle is in motion. The legislation makes this action a primary traffic offense, giving law enforcement the power to stop drivers solely for engaging in this activity.

Until now, it had been a secondary offense and a traffic ticket for using a handheld electronic device could only be issued if the car was stopped for a primary offense such as speeding or red light or most other traffic violations.

The Governor also announced that the penalty for using a cellular phone without a hands-free device or using a handheld electronic device while driving would increase from two to three points through changes in state regulations. At the start of this year, this was actually a no point violation. In February it became a two point violation and five months later it’s getting a bump to a three point violation.

The law itself remains unchanged. We’ve discussed it before and you can read more about it here (NY Driving While Talking On Cell Phone And Texting While Driving)

The fines all remain the same. Traffic law enforcement and traffic ticket prosecution may indeed in most cases be more about revenue collection than safety, but this seems to be a simple straight forward attempt to get people to pay more attention and put their gadgets down while driving.

Scott Feifer, Esq.

Ryan Dunn died in a fiery crash this week.

He was undeterred by the many speeding tickets he was issued over the years and the numerous driving related legal matters he dealt with.  He continued to drive the way he liked to drive and ultimately this cost him his life.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, over the past 13 years Dunn’s driving record shows over 20 incidents, including 10 speeding and careless driving stops, three times driving with a suspended license and a drunken driving arrest from 2005.

Dunn’s Porsche literally disintegrated on impact early Monday morning after it flew over a guardrail, tore through trees and erupted in flames.

Police accident reconstruction shows the car was going at least 130 mph.

While toxicology reports will take four to six weeks, there is a chance alcohol played a role here as well.  Despite a local bar manager’s statement that he saw Dunn leave and did not believe him to be drunk, Dunn did post pictures of himself on twitter earlier that evening drinking and enjoying an evening which just didn’t seem as if it should have ended with him behind the wheel.

Governor Cuomo plans to introduce a bill to toughen existing laws prohibiting drivers from texting or use of portable electronic devices while driving. The bill closes loopholes and adds stricter penalties for distracted driving, which contributes to more than 10,000 crashes per year in New York state.

Cuomo issued a statement on the bill:  “Every day, countless drivers, particularly teenagers and young adults, drive with their eyes on a screen rather than the road,” said Cuomo. “Current warnings, educational programs, and driving laws aren’t working. We need to impose a true deterrent to stop people from driving while using an electronic device and to keep our roads and citizens safe.”

New York’s existing law on texting while driving passed in 2009.   The biggest perceived weakness in the existing law is a provision that makes distracted driving a “secondary offense,” meaning a traffic ticket for texting while driving will not be issued unless the driver had been pulled over for another infraction.  A discussion of the current texting law and how it differs from the current cell phone law (which is not a “secondary offense”) can be found here:  Texting While Driving and Cell Phone Tickets

The Cuomo bill would make distracted driving a primary offense, increase the number of points the violation carries from two to three, and mandate education on the dangers of distracted driving as part of the NY defensive driving curriculum.

The bill does not go as far as some would like it to:  ban cell phone use while driving altogether, hands free or not.

In related news, NY representative Carolyn McCarthy has introduced national legislation regarding cell phone use while driving.

An unbelievable 100,000 unresolved traffic tickets have been found crammed into cabinets at the Greenburgh (Westchester) Town Court.

The moving violations go back as far as 1993. In some cases, the town failed to take certain actions like suspending a driver license, scheduling a trial or sending out fine notices.

I don’t want to get on the Greenburgh Town Court in particular.  It happens to be one of the more reasonable courts we deal with and best I can recall we haven’t had any particularly bad administrative issues with any of our cases.

However, we do have clients who sometimes question why a case is taking so long or why their case in one court is not proceeding just like their previous case in a different court or why a notice was sent from a court that shouldn’t have been sent or how we reported one thing to our client but the court or DMV is claiming something altogether different, etc.  This incident in Greenburgh is important because it illustrates a couple of points that anyone who receives a ticket in one of New York’s local courts should understand:

1.  The NYS DMV will have no idea you received a traffic ticket answerable to a local court unless and until the local court notifies the DMV of it’s existence.  Typically, a local court will only have reason to communicate with the DMV concerning a ticket if an individual is late answering or paying a fine or otherwise somehow delinquent or if a case has been completed and an individual has been convicted of a moving violation.  This is how people get notices from DMV on an old case after years of conducting business as usual (registrations, renewals, etc) with the DMV.  A court finds old tickets and finally notifies that DMV that there’s a delinquency.

2.  COURTS MAKE MISTAKES.  Had to mention that. Yes, lawyers and law firms make mistakes too but I hope an incident like this helps show that it’s not always your lawyer’s fault if something unexpected happens during a case.  Courts are only as efficient as the human clerks they rely on.  As we know, humans make mistakes and these mistakes can range from accidentally hitting the wrong number on a keyboard to stuffing 100,000 tickets into a cabinet.  We’ve ran into situations where there was a court error and everything was corrected in due time.

Note that statute of limitations has nothing to do with this.  Statute of limitations has to do with how long it takes the People to charge an individual with a crime or infraction.  People were charged at the time they got the ticket years ago.  This is simply a delay in prosecuting the charge.

If you receive a notice about an old Greenburgh traffic ticket or other old NY traffic ticket that has long since been forgotten, feel free to call us if you have any questions.  There may be some reasons, most notably the age of the ticket, to think a little outside the box when deciding how to proceed.

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq.

Read more about the issue in Greenburgh here.

The NY Move Over Law is more than just a symbolic violation to honor Officers Ambrose and Searles for whom the law is named.

It’s a new law that went into effect on Jan 1, 2011 and we are starting to see officers out there for crackdowns specifically on motorists who fail to “move over” and switch lanes while approaching an emergency vehicle engaged on the side of the road.

A recent week long enforcement blitz in Poughkeepsie resulted in the issuance of 865 tickets.  A similar two day blitz in the Buffalo area resulted in 43 move over traffic tickets issued.

You can read more about the Ambrose-Searles NY Move Over Law or just keep in mind these two points:

• On all roadways, you must reduce your speed when approaching an emergency vehicle.

• On larger roadways (Parkways, Controlled Access Highways, roadways with multiple lanes) you must reduce your speed and move from the lane immediately adjacent to the emergency vehicle as soon as it’s safe to do so.

If you’ve been issued one of these tickets, let us know.  They carry two points and we’d love to hear the circumstances under which yours was issued.

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq

Murray Weiss of DNAinfo.com, who seems to be out in front of the news on this ticket fixing scandal, has reported that the whole mess may be getting worse.

The probe all started with recorded conversations and what was heard on thousands of hours of tape goes far beyond just fixing traffic violations for friends and family. Alleged misconduct includes officers trying to quiet domestic violence and drunk-driving incidents involving off-duty police and officers making arrangements involving prostitutes. Nothing to do with traffic tickets but the alleged misconduct will be tied with the traffic ticket scandal nonetheless.

Evidence is currently being presented to a Bronx grand jury that’s weighing criminal charges. Prosecutors are setting threshold levels to determine which cases will rise to the criminal level and which will remain internal police administrative disciplinary issues.

Weiss points out that right now the number of criminal cases may be near 40 while the number of administrative cases as high as 500.

Weiss also expresses a desire, and I agree, that only the most egregious abuses end up being treated harshly.

The original article can be found here.

Jim Dwyer of the New York Times wrote an interesting piece in light of the current NYPD traffic ticket fixing scandal on the lengths people go to avoid paying traffic ticket fines.

In his words, “of the many fevers that can grip the human animal, the desire to fix parking and traffic tickets has few equals for absurdity”.

I don’t think that the actual “desire to fix” is itself absurd.  When someone is pulled over for something they didn’t do or something everyone else on the road was doing or is given multiple tickets for the same offense or is treated rudely by an officer or is endanger of losing their license or their job or is facing thousands of dollars a year in additional auto insurance or very high fines and assessments or reads stories about how the DMV has raised fines and surcharges or about how officers are issuing more tickets to compensate for a poor economy or fill a quota….

My point?  There are many valid reasons for fighting traffic tickets and trying to “fix” the situation.

Tickets should be fought the right way, however. Plead not guilty, speak to a prosecutor, speak to an attorney, etc.   There are risks trying to fix tickets any other way (as the officers currently under investigation now know) and this NYT article makes a good point–the lengths people go to to get tickets fixed any other way does sometimes seem to be a bit too much.

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq.

Over the last few days there have been multiple news reports about a traffic ticket fixing scandal in NYC. We’ll be following and commenting on this story as it develops. Here is what we know thus far:

• Two dozen or so Bronx NYPD officers may face criminal charges after a lengthy inquiry into the practice of traffic ticket fixing.
• The tickets in question are almost all moving violations.  The investigation focuses mostly on the time before a system was put in place which made it harder for an officer to simply “lose” a ticket.
• Wiretaps were used in the investigation and the transcripts show how common traffic ticket fixing is and how open officers often were discussing it with each other.
• The investigation started when wiretaps in place for an unrelated matter turned up a conversation about helping fix a ticket.
• It’s not clear when the grand jury investigation being conducted by the Bronx DA’s Office and/or the administrative investigation conducted by the NYPD Internal Affair’s Bureau will be completed.
• While the number of criminal charges may be around two dozen, on the police administrative end we may 200 or so cases pursued.

It’s difficult to comment until more details emerge.  For now, safe to say it might not be the best time to ask that officer to see “what he can do” about that ticket you just got.

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq

Traffic ticket quotas usually cost the ordinary driver more money. In a twist on that usual theme, theses quotas just cost the city of Los Angeles $4 million dollars.

Two LAPD officers, who set forth that their reputation was affected and their career damaged by refusing to meet certain traffic ticket quotas, were awarded the damages as compensation. The quota system in question was put in place by their captain at the LAPD’s West Traffic Division. The system called for issuance of at least 18 tickets per day, including a certain number of “big mover” traffic violations like speeding or red light.

“Big mover” referred to the particularly high fines associated with certain violation.

The city argued that productive traffic ticket writing was simply about trying to make roads safer, not specific quotas.

My take on the quota issue has always been that of course there are quotas. There are “quotas” in every job to some extent. I expect a certain level of productivity out of my employees and that is their “quota”. I evaluate how much they get done and how well they do their job. They get positive feedback if they meet my expectations of a productive employee, negative feedback if they produce below my expectations.

When an officer is sent out on traffic enforcement, what happens if he returns having issued zero summonses? What if he did that day after day? A supervising officer would certainly not be happy and would argue the officer isn’t doing his job. Now what happens if he issues one ticket? Two? Five? At what point is the supervising officer happy with the productivity? Whatever the answer, there’s your “quota”.

In theory, quotas aren’t entirely wrong. If an officer sits on the side of the road reading a magazine his entire shift and ignores traffic violations, he deserves to be reprimanded and accused of underperforming. The problem starts when there’s a legitimate slow day–bad weather, a holiday, Dancing with the Stars finale or other phenomenon that has reduced traffic on the road–and an officer feels pressure to produce certain numbers nonetheless. As soon as that pressure leads to the issuance of one single ticket that otherwise wouldn’t have been written we see why “quota” is a bad word that can lead to multi million dollar lawsuits.

The solution? As with just about everything else in life it’s finding a balance. Officers should be vigilant and issue tickets when they observe violations while supervising officers need to understand that officers cannot feel any pressure to issue tickets they don’t feel comfortable with. Not necessarily easy, but the other option–a hard quota–is unacceptable.

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq.

In Onondaga County, NY 1,280 window tint tickets were issued in March.

This is an unusually high number and is a result of a push by the Onondaga County Traffic Safety Advisory Board to focus on specific traffic violations.

The Board started with tinted windows in March. One officer explained that excessively tinted windows present officer safety issues and help drivers hide other potential moving violations inside the car such as seat belt and cell phone violations.

Now, enforcement will focus on a different violation in April and every month through the end of the year.

In order for an effort like this to ever really be effective, all violation issuing agencies would need to be on the same page. Town and village police, sherriff’s deputies and state police have all agreed to focus on the same violation at the same time. Officers have been asked to have a zero-tolerance policy for the particular targeted offense.

In my opinion, “targeting” particular violations can be problematic in some situations. Tell an officer to go out and issue speeding tickets and he may suddenly issue tickets that he would not have previously issued. An officer may feel the need to err on the side of issuing a ticket, instead of letting a motorist go, in situations where he was not 100% certain a traffic violation was committed.

That said, this initiative doesn’t appear on it’s face to be a malicious one. The monthly offenses scheduled do stand out as some of the more common and potentially problematic violations. Police, children, pedestrians and the safety of other motorists on the road are all taken into consideration. As long as the summonses are fairly issued and adjudicated, this may be a way to get some drivers to develop some new habits that would only make the roads that much safer.

Here’s a list of the violations and the months they’ll be targeted:

April-cell phone/texting

May-seat belt/child restraint

June-motorcycle safety/helmet

July-speed/move over a safe distance for stopped police cars

Aug.-stop sign/pedestrian/crosswalk safety

Sept.-school zone speed/passed school buses

Oct.-cell phone/texting

Nov.-seatbelt/child restraint

Dec.-impaired driving

Submitted by Scott Feifer, Esq.