I used to watch a lot of traffic court videos as background noise. Normally it was people who knew they were guilty showing up with lame excuses.
One time though there was a guy who got a ticket for rolling a stop sign. The issue was it was a very poorly placed sign that was ridiculously far back from the intersection. The guy had fully stopped at the sign, pulled up to the intersection and slowed down to check and then rolled through it. The cop had reluctantly agreed that is what happened once the guy laid it out.
Despite the cop admitting it was a bad ticket since the guy hadn’t actually rolled through the sign, the prosecutor pulled up the law which said a car must stop at a stop sign, or in an intersection without one must slow and yield to traffic, and tried to argue that because the intersection had a stop sign that the guy in the car was required to fully stop both at the poorly placed sign AND at the intersection. He went back and forth with the judge for like ten minutes while subtly misquoting the text of the law rather than just letting it go. After both the guy with the ticket and the cop both spoke up the way too long proceeding finally broke in the guy’s favor.
The total court appearance was like 45 minutes, with much of it spent with a judge and prosecutor talking through a stop sign law. If it was so ambiguous that professional legal experts need to talk it through then it is absurd to ticket a person in the moment for making the wrong choice.
I used to watch a lot of traffic court videos as background noise. Normally it was people who knew they were guilty showing up with lame excuses.
One time though there was a guy who got a ticket for rolling a stop sign. The issue was it was a very poorly placed sign that was ridiculously far back from the intersection. The guy had fully stopped at the sign, pulled up to the intersection and slowed down to check and then rolled through it. The cop had reluctantly agreed that is what happened once the guy laid it out.
Despite the cop admitting it was a bad ticket since the guy hadn’t actually rolled through the sign, the prosecutor pulled up the law which said a car must stop at a stop sign, or in an intersection without one must slow and yield to traffic, and tried to argue that because the intersection had a stop sign that the guy in the car was required to fully stop both at the poorly placed sign AND at the intersection. He went back and forth with the judge for like ten minutes while subtly misquoting the text of the law rather than just letting it go. After both the guy with the ticket and the cop both spoke up the way too long proceeding finally broke in the guy’s favor.
The total court appearance was like 45 minutes, with much of it spent with a judge and prosecutor talking through a stop sign law. If it was so ambiguous that professional legal experts need to talk it through then it is absurd to ticket a person in the moment for making the wrong choice.