Honolulu Lite
Life can be hard for the stupid and, believe me, I've got a little experience in that field. One thing I've learned, however, is that if you can't be bright, you can at least pay attention. Tickets make us look stupid
- and we don’t need helpWhich is why I was surprised that on the second day of court hearings for people busted for speeding by the insidious radar traffic cameras, there still were people stupid enough to try to weasel out of their tickets by telling the judge sob stories. Only a day before, two District Court judges had thrown out hundreds of speeding tickets after it was learned they contained a technical flaw: There was nothing on the citations to indicate the camera operator was certified to run the blasted things. Once that flaw was brought to the court's attention, you'd think that the judges would simply dismiss all of the tickets.
But no. They made each ticket holder either point out the flaw on their own or hang themselves with some lame excuse about why they had actually been speeding. In effect, only the stupid were being found liable for speeding because they had not been paying attention.
Even the second day of hearings, after the governor said the camera enforcement program would be halted until the flaw in the citations was fixed, at least one judge was still finding those guilty who were not swift enough to say the magic words: The citations are flawed, your honor.
This was really unfair, as David Swann pointed out after beating his own speeding rap.
Swann, a Star-Bulletin graphic artist, got one of the first camera tickets issued. He's lucky that way. He brought it over to my house for me to look at. I covered courts a long time, and he wanted my opinion on whether he should pay it or fight it. I fearlessly told him he should fight it, because, hey, it's not my money.
He hired a lawyer, Pat McPherson, who discovered the flaw in the citations. Swann was the first person called before the judge, and his attorney's argument set a precedent for everyone else to follow that day who was not comatose. The judge threw out Swann's ticket and then proceeded to throw out all the others of people cited the same flaw.
Once the flaw in the ticket was known, I don't understand how judges could still find anyone holding the odious citation guilty of anything. Is the law there simply to protect the alert? Shouldn't the Public Defender's Office Department of the Clueless have had someone standing by to protect the stupid?
As Swann put it, "Making those poor (expletives) pay when the (expletive deleted) tickets had not been done right is a (expletive deleted) outrage." Dave can be (expletive deleted) excitable at times.
That the camera enforcement program even confused the judges is just another example of how the whole thing stunk from the get-go.
This was a case of technology making policy, which is exactly backward. If the people of Hawaii want a zero tolerance speeding policy for safety reasons, then fine. But they don't. It was forced on them by a private company with a new gadget out to make big bucks. Why was there such a visceral reaction against the camera program? It was sneaky. It was insulting. And, most of all, it was anti-aloha.
Now it's making people look stupid, and some of us don't need any extra help there.
Alo-Ha! Friday compiles odd bits of news from Hawaii
and the world to get your weekend off to an entertaining start.
Charles Memminger also writes Honolulu Lite Mondays,
Wednesdays and Sundays. Send ideas to him at the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., Suite 7-210,
Honolulu 96813, phone 235-6490 or e-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
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