I'm with you on the 6th Amendment, but I confess to mixed feelings. I am personally aware of one intersection in Pasadena, California in which red-light cameras had a direct and almost immediate effect of reducing traffic fatalities. On the far side of this intersection as one approaches it going northbound on a heavily traveled 1-way street, that street becomes a freeway onramp onto a busy northbound freeway on the other side of the signal. What happens is that as northbound traffic approaches the signal, drivers tend to accelerate toward it, trying to make it onto the onramp before the signal changes, and to accelerate to merging speed by the time they are on the onramp. The cross street is a major 2-way thoroughfare which people use for getting across town during rush hour. To make matters worse, the intersection is an almost blind approach from a couple of directions.RoyGBiv wrote:The Sixth Amendment.?jmra wrote:Idk, but why don't you just pay it?
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Accidents caused by people running red lights happened with greater frequency in this intersection than in others in town, and a several of these accidents had resulted in fatalities over a period of perhaps 10 years. When the city first posted red-light cameras, they started at this intersection. Yes, it is a revenue generator for the city, but when word got out that there was a red-light camera there and that they would stick you with a sizable fine for running a red light, the accident rate diminished almost to zero, and the fatalities did diminish to zero. Without the threat of municiple revenue generation, the red-light camera would have had no teeth, and nothing would have happened to diminish accidents and deaths.
For me, this becomes one of those issues where public safety gets balanced against constitutional interests. I honestly don't know how to resolve these things. But we accept these issues in terms of guns, for instance. We acquiesce to laws which forbid us to shoot our guns within city limits unless it is in self-defense or defense of property. Why? Because even the most militantly pro-gun 2nd Amendment activist recognizes that there is a legitimate public safety issue here, and that placing a restriction on when (not if) we can discharge our firearms within city limits is a reasonable response to a reasonable concern for public safety. We even have the often inappropriately applied free speech meme of shouting fire in a theater. It's illegal most of the time.....unless there actually is a fire.....but in principle it is a reasonable recognition that the exercise of a constitutionally guaranteed right in an irresponsible manner which will place others at risk may be forbidden by law.
So in the case of the red-light cameras at the intersection in Pasadena that I mentioned, the right to confront one's accuser is being balanced against the legitimate public safety concern. I'm not going to claim that I know this is right. I only know that—in THIS case—the suspension of full access to the protections of the 6th Amendment did result in a quantifiable reduction in accidents and fatalities.
Similarly, I have seen people on this board complain that the fines they pay for speeding is nothing more than revenue generation. Go work in an ER, on the PM shift for a few months, and then come back and tell me if you still feel the same way. Fines don't prevent all speeding, but surely they reduce it; and in reducing speeding, it reduces damage to private property, traumatic injuries, and fatalities. In any case, if one doesn't want to get fined for speeding, one shouldn't speed. It's just not that hard not to do. Just ease up on the gas a little bit. Don't want to get caught by red-light cameras and get fined for running lights? Don't run red lights.
Sometimes, it is unfair. Yellow lights are supposed to be a caution to drivers to slow down and prepare to stop, not to speed up and try to beat the red light. Literally NOBODY who has a drivers license has been uninformed about the purpose of a yellow light. It's in the educational handbooks. It's taught in drivers ed classes. It's in the law. The law is not to blame when an individual's feckless lack of attention leaves him "uninformed" in the face of all the attempts to inform him. When someone is legitimately caught out by a short yellow, that IS unfair. However, the length of a yellow signal can be adjusted if enough motorists complain that the yellow is too short to serve its intended purpose. But when someone gets caught running a light because they used the yellow as an excuse to speed up and try to beat the red, I don't have much sympathy.
To the OP, man up and pay your fine. If you don't want to pay it, then man up and ask for your day in court, which is your right as a citizen. That is your car the camera took a picture of, isn't it? If it's not you driving it, you're still ultimately responsible for how it is used....unless it was stolen. Assuming it wasn't stolen, then your car, with presumably you driving it did run a red light. Right or wrong, fair or unfair, that comes with consequences. It may not be a disqualifier to get your CHL, but if you don't pay it, sooner or later it will catch up with you, and it will be a lot worse then than it would be to just pay the fine now.
Sorry, I didn't mean to rant, but you guys know me.......