Oregon – Hauling a truckload of logs to a Southern Oregon mill last fall, Chris Hill noticed a sheriff’s deputy behind him and flashed his lights to warn a UPS driver coming the other way.
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The deputy pulled over Hill on U.S. Highway 140 in White City and handed him a $260 ticket for improperly using his headlights, saying another deputy had seen the flashing lights from behind the UPS truck and alerted him to stop the log truck because of the signaling.
Outraged, Hill decided to fight the ticket, and on Wednesday, a Jackson County Justice Court judge dismissed the citation, finding that motorists flashing their headlights amounts to speech protected by the Oregon Constitution.
Judge Joseph Carter determined the law covering the use of high beams was valid, but was unconstitutional as it was applied by the deputy.
“The citation was clearly given to punish the Defendant for that expression,” the judge wrote. “The government certainly can and should enforce the traffic laws for the safety of all drivers on the road. However, the government cannot enforce the traffic laws, or any other laws, to punish drivers for their expressive conduct.”
The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office did not return a telephone call for comment.
Hill, 38, of Klamath Falls, has been driving truck for 10 years, and was not interested in seeing his insurance rates go up for getting a ticket. He initially told the deputy that the UPS driver was his neighbor, and he was just saying hello.
“My point to the cop was his partner didn’t know why I was flashing my lights,” Hill said. “He couldn’t tell for sure what I was doing.”
By the time his case went to court last month, Hill had researched the law and found nothing that expressly prohibited the use of headlights to signal other drivers. He also recalled a TV news story about a federal judge in the Midwest barring police from handing out tickets to drivers who flashed their lights to warn others of a speed trap ahead.
“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll throw that in there, too,'” he said.
Acting as his own attorney in a hearing conducted by telephone, Hill said he acknowledged the UPS driver wasn’t his neighbor, and he raised the free speech argument.
“What I did wasn’t illegal, whether it’s freedom of speech or not,” he told The Associated Press.
Dave Fidanque, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, noted the Oregon Court of Appeals overturned a traffic law prohibiting horn honking for non-traffic purposes on similar grounds in the 1990s after a number of people got tickets for honking in support of U.S. troops during the first Gulf War.
“If the motive of the sheriff’s deputies was in fact not to make the roads safer, but to raise more revenue from traffic enforcement, that would be even more reason why it should be unconstitutional,” Fidanque said. “If this is part of a pattern, then it probably would be worth us looking into it in more detail.”
This is a clear case of road reckless anticipation of lost wages and problematic reporting of speed discrepancies.
This should actually be a constitutional right for the police to stop the driver who flickered his headlights because trust in Government is not a broken limit of congressional disfigurement.
I could be glad myself. I never flash them and I never think its my business to report the authorities’ presence to the next straggler in the formation of another person’s walk in the favorable roadways.
You can be glad that they ruled as they do, but in a lawful society, this act of warning oncoming traffic is a failure to obey traffic laws since you are trying to destroy the reasoning behind traffic stops.
Its a small technicality, but overall, the more that we rule to let possibilities of hacking exist, the more we will all be hacked.
This is a problem.
What is wrong with telling other people about the actions of public officials? Since the purpose of a speed trap is to reduce speeding, not to raise revenue, the police have no reason to complain.
Dear Anonymous: as you know by now, your posts almost impossible to understand. Any chance you are using Google to translate from a foreign language?
Let freedom ring… one less thing to worry about
Thanks. There are no laws against DRIVING SAFE. Keep the speed limit and you do not have to break the law. Safety is not warning someone that they are approaching ideas of dotted difference. I regret so many were upset but Torah requires us to be creditable. To think you can flash and warn other drivers just out of the “goodness of your broken heart” does not mean that all laws should be changed to allow the schnorrer to nakedly net his own zeros. List opportunity is not dream support. OBEY THE LAW.
Justice is not a measure of lax welts. If you try to obstruct police business- that man you “saved” could also be the man who might live to commit some other crime another day. Perhaps next time he speeds, it will be you or your family he hits by “accident” since he was not apprehended and ticketed at the time it was headed for in life. You can scrap all you want but Torah does not call for the jew to season himself with platonic love of neglected assessment. None of you have an orthodox approach. In fact: it is ‘criminal-dox’. Show respect for the authorities. I do not flash my lights to warn other drivers and I do try to always keep the speed limit. All of you who listed me as ‘problematic’ share only your own temptation with doomed prediction. Save yourself first. Foolish.