TexasCHLforum.com

A few observations:

1. At night it takes no effort at all to see whether a vehicle that has just passed in the opposite direction had its license plate illuminated or not through the side view mirror. I takes a little practice to get the focus, but once you do, it's easy. Try it.

2. The term "pretext stop" as used here seems to imply that it's improper law enforcement practice to use an actual minor violation as a reason to stop a vehicle an officer would like to examine more closely for potentially more serious offenses. It's not. The supreme court has held that as long as the violation the stop was made for actually existed at the time the stop is valid, and so is any lawful action taken in response to observations that come from that stop.

3. If a vehicle is equipped with 2 license plate lights, it's because both are needed to adequately illuminate the plate. Manufacturers don't spend a dime on regulatory compliance lighting that they don't have to.

4. There is nothing inherently illegal or unsafe about an officer making a U-turn on a 4 lane road if traffic conditions permit. They must have been OK because the OP does not mention any wrecks or near collisions as a result.

If all the emotion is taken out of it, this was a simple and lawful minor traffic violation stop.

This stop could easily have happened to me, and I have been stopped by officers for rear lighting violations. In one case a suitcase had shifted in the trunk and pulled the tail light plug out of its connector to the wiring harness. If he hadn't stopped me, it would have taken me weeks or months to find out about it.

In another case a trooper stopped me just after I got off an interstate to tell me all of my rear lights were out - a very bad thing while driving 70 MPH at night. The next day I found that road salt had worked its way into a crack in the tail light power wire and eaten through the conductor. That was another issue I could have driven with unknowingly for some time at significant risk.

I can't find anything at all valid to moan about in the OP's description of his incident. Both officer and motorist acted courteously and professionally. The officer did what he is being paid to do, and he used his discretion to simply advise a motorist he believed to be a responsible person to correct a minor violation instead of issuing a citation. That's the way things are supposed to work.

If the officer was looking for something more, he did so at the invitation of the motorist who had in fact not maintained his lighting devices in compliance with requirements everybody knows about.