Legal News

On License Plates, Traffic Cameras and the Constitution

By Amir Efrati

Two constitutional challenges recently caught our eye. Yesterday one of those challenges was quashed in Ohio, while another is pending in South Carolina.

In the S.C. case, Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State will ask a federal judge for a preliminary injunction to keep the state Department of Motor Vehicles from issuing plates that depict a stained-glass window with a cross and carrying the words “I Believe.” State authorities have indicated plans to start issuing the plates in mid-December. Here’s background from USA Today.

In June the group filed a lawsuit on behalf of several religious leaders and minority communities who claimed their First Amendment rights would be infringed by the proposed plate. The lawsuit, filed after South Carolina’s legislature passed a law allowing the plates to be issued, charges that the Christian plate gives preferential government treatment to one faith in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Plaintiffs include four South Carolina clergy and the Hindu American Foundation and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. The plaintiffs noted in their motion for preliminary injunction that some legislators said that they would not vote for similar plates for minority faiths.

Meanwhile, David Dowd Jr., a federal judge in Akron, Ohio, ruled yesterday that the use of traffic cameras in Akron was constitutional. The ruling ended a three-year lawsuit filed by Warner Mendenhall (a lawyer) on behalf of his wife, who got a speeding ticket after being caught by a portable camera in an Akron school zone in November 2005. Here’s the story from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Typically, notes the Plain-Dealer, traffic law violations caught on the cameras are treated as a civil offense, without traffic-court hearings, points assessed against driver’s licenses or escalating fines. Like parking tickets, the violation goes to the owner of the vehicle, not necessarily the driver.

But Mendenhall argued that the penalties actually were criminal and that the program unfairly punishes the vehicle’s owner and that they violated his constitutional right of due process. Mendenhall’s wife won an administrative appeal of her ticket; the Plain-Dealer reports he spent nearly $10,000 of his own money to fight use of the cameras.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 11, 2008 (boomark / email).