Most of us agree that people should not allow their cell phones to distract them while they are driving. And police officers should be enforcing the laws that prohibit drivers from talking on a handheld device while they are driving. But things have gotten out of hand when an officer writes a ticket for talking on a cell phone while driving when the driver didn’t even a cell phone in the car with him.Moreover, the man didn’t even own a phone. Nor did his wife who was in the car with him.
The couple is from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The husband said he driving when an officer pulled them over. The officer gave him a ticket for a whopping a $199.80 stating that he violated the rules about driving while talking on a cellphone.He tried to explain that he didn’t have a cell phone in the car and even encouraged the officer to search the car to make sure he hadn’t hidden the phone when he saw the officer’s lights behind him..“I told them, ‘Do whatever it takes. There’s no phone in here; never has been. I don’t know anything about the phone.’ But they won’t have it,” he told CBC News. “They were just going crazy, going to arrest me, and they were nasty to my wife as well.”Unable to reason with the citing officer, the couple went to the local police station to complain about the bogus ticket.
When they told another officer that they were ticketed even though they didn’t own a cell phone, the officer just laughed and said that the perhaps the officer wrote the ticket to fill a quota.Canada is not the only country dealing with absurd enforcement of cell phone bans. In Perth, Australia, a man was given a $250 ticket for operating a horse-drawn carriage while talking on his cell phone. In California, a man recently got his ticket for using a GPS application on his phone while sitting in traffic dismissed. It is still illegal, however, to talk on a hand held device or send text messages while driving in California.
If you do receive a ticket for talking on a cell phone in California, you may have a legitimate defense such as the fact that you were not talking or texting on the phone—as the California GPS case showed, you can still use some apps. Talk to a California traffic ticket specialist today.