With the impending arrival of speed cameras in HoCo, I found Gene Weingartens column in The Washington Post Magazine this week to be especially poignant. Gene is no fan of speed cameras.
“I dislike speed cameras to the extent that, were it not for the likelihood of incarceration, I would hunt them all down like snakes and behead them with shovels.”
After accompanying a reader to hearing to protest a speed camera ticket, Gene discovered a way how to beat the supposedly infallible system. The accused did not deny that he was driving the car nor the fact that he may have been speeding. His defense instead rested on the fallibility of bureaucracy.
“… unlike the other defendants in the room, John has a thick dossier in front of him. It contains records of his attempts, online, to subpoena from the D.C. police arcane documents tangentially related to his case — including a year’s worth of maintenance records on the radar machine that nailed him, a copy of the contract between the city and the company that services the radar, including “all attachments and exhibits thereto,” etc. It’s all nuts, but it’s also his legal right to see this stuff. And the city never responded to his requests.”
Case dismissed.
