Podunk town's speed trap 'tax' tripped up

[pmbug]

Today, Stow Municipal Court issued a court order declaring it will suspend its appeal fee that required motorists to pay $100, which effectively put justice behind a paywall. Motorists passing through the village of Peninsula and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park will now be free to challenge a speeding ticket in court without first paying an unnecessary and excessive fee.

Last month, the Institute for Justice sent a letter to the village of Peninsula, Ohio calling on officials with the town to change their traffic enforcement system, which violated motorists’ constitutional rights, particularly their right to due process. Additionally, IJ called upon the Stow Municipal Court to drop its $100 fee associated with speeding ticket appeals.

Since the late spring of 2023, Peninsula police officers have used handheld speed cameras to issue thousands of speeding tickets, producing hundreds of thousands of dollars in income for the tiny village. Worse yet, drivers who chose to contest their ticket were forced to pay a $100 fee to the Stow Municipal Court. That fee was unconstitutional because it violated Americans’ right to due process, which requires the government to provide a meaningful hearing before taking an individual’s property.

“We are pleased that the Stow Municipal Court has suspended its unconstitutional $100 fee for the right to contest a traffic violation,” said IJ Litigation Fellow Bobbi Taylor. “We hope that this ‘suspension’ will become a permanent protection of the constitutional right to due process.”

While Stow Municipal Court made the right decision to respect motorists’ constitutional rights, IJ continues to call on the village of Peninsula to reassess its traffic enforcement system more broadly. A tiny village of just 536 people, Peninsula has issued 8,900 tickets since April, providing $1.3 million in revenue. These staggering numbers raise concern that the village’s ticketing is nothing more than a policing for profit scheme. Various courts have ruled that such revenue generation, especially at the levels seen in Peninsula, raises serious constitutional concerns. Specifically, courts worry law enforcement could be enforcing the law in the name of profit, not public safety.

IJ has a long history of fighting money-making schemes that prioritize profit over safety. IJ has sued dozens of local governments for infringing on citizens’ rights by collecting unreasonable fees, including through procedures that violate the Constitution’s due process clause. IJ’s litigation includes Timbs v. Indiana, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution’s protection against excessive fines applied to state and local governments.

Ohio Municipal Court Suspends Unconstitutional Fee That Violates Motorists’ Right to Due Process - Institute for Justice

ARLINGTON, Va.—Today, Stow Municipal Court issued a court order declaring it will suspend its appeal fee that required motorists to pay $100, which effectively put […]

ij.org

 

[Cigarlover]

All traffic fines are policing for profit. If it was about public safety then a cop could just pull someone over when traveling above the posted speed limit and give them a "Lawful Order" to stop speeding.
I often thought that any state with the ability to put it on a ballot should make maximum traffic fines 25.00. Cops wouldn't even both anymore if the was the case.

 

[BackwardsEngineer]

Multiple decades old story... but peninsula held a very.. very fine red headed lass that one BE left Kent on many a friday to visit.. often drove as fast as my 74 spirit of america vega would take me.

Back to your regularly scheduled program

 

[Casey Jones]

Ohio Municipal Court Suspends Unconstitutional Fee That Violates Motorists’ Right to Due Process - Institute for Justice

ARLINGTON, Va.—Today, Stow Municipal Court issued a court order declaring it will suspend its appeal fee that required motorists to pay $100, which effectively put […]

ij.org

Ohio has long been a hotbed of this sort of activity. Just a few dozen miles north of the Stow-CV National-Park area, there was, for the longest time, Linndale, on Interstate 71.

Now, Ohio has a curious law: State Highway Patrol is NOT permitted to enforce speed laws in municipal-corporation limits. In the linked case, that would be Peninsula, a municipal corporation, where the "responsibility" for enforcing traffic laws, would be the "city's." Not the State Patrol's, and not the Sheriff's.

In Linndale, 500 yards of I-71 went through what had been Linndale's municipal boundaries. Now, Linndale was a "pocket suburb" of Cleveland. It EXISTED, as a railroad bedroom community - it was where the black Pullman porters of various railroad scheduled passenger runs, would live. Cleveland didn't want them living in the German-majority Ohio-City area; they were wealthy enough to resent living in Hough, which was further away, anyway. Linndale was created, and there they lived.

The railroad structure changed, and the Pullman company went away. The Interstate came and crossed over a small quarter of their tiny municipal limits. There were no exit ramps directly into Linndale, but for decades, that didn't matter. They had a police force, and most of what it did was hand out tickets on I-71, some deserved, many not.

Challenges were thrown out on technicalities. If you wanted to spend tens of thousands of dollars to fight a $100 ticket, you could. In 30 years time, nobody did...until an attorney got busted, and was rich enough and angry enough and connected enough, to shut the operation down. Part of it had to do with a charge of fiscal mismanagement by the city of Linndale, leading to the mayor and key players being removed.

It was about that time that I left the area, and when I returned a decade later, Linndale was just waving to speeders as they roared through to the Brooklyn speed trap a half-mile away. Another tiny inner-ring suburb.

The problem is state law, which limits the State Patrol - which may or may not be a good thing - but also county sheriffs, which in other states, could be used to curb abuses. Or at least compete for the revenue, by also writing tickets, making speed-trapping unprofitable.