Traffic Judges Hear Tales Worth Citing

The most creative excuse for lawbreaking that Thomas Roll ever heard involved spit.

A young man accused of speeding stood in court cross-examining the police officer who had given him a ticket for speeding. After questioning the officer extensively on the technical aspects of radar detection and interference that might trip it up, the young man turned to Roll.

“Your honor,” the sober-faced defendant said, “I saw the officer, and just at the minute he picked up the radar gun, I spit out the window. I think what the radar picked up was the speed of my spit.”

Roll paused a moment before replying. Then, he recalls, “I judiciously covered my mouth so he couldn’t see me grinning and found him guilty. I’ve never had a better one.”

Everyone hates getting traffic tickets. There’s the fine and the chance your insurance will increase, and besides, you see people breaking traffic laws every day with impunity. So you might as well try to beat it.

Most of the time you’ll proclaim your innocence to a judge pro tem. Practicing attorneys, they sit in judgment of the endless array of traffic cases that parade through Orange County courtrooms. The courts like the arrangement because it frees real judges to concentrate on more important cases, such as murder and rape. The lawyers, who usually donate four to eight hours of their time per month, like it because it expands their horizons and gives them experiences they can sometimes parlay into permanent seats on the bench.

“I come from a generation that says you’re supposed to be a giver and not just a taker,” says Roll, 43, who’s been volunteering his time for 10 years and would like to become a permanent judge. Like other judge pro tems, he had to meet the minimum requirement of five years of legal experience and completion of a daylong training seminar. “It’s a way that we can pay back the community,” he says.

Not to mention get a few laughs from the drivers who choose to argue their cases rather than just pay their fines. Like the man who claimed that he couldn’t possibly have been speeding because his 1994 diesel Mercedes-Benz wouldn’t go more than 55 mph. Or the woman accused of driving solo in the carpool lane who showed up to plead not guilty and to retrieve the life-sized inflatable doll that had accompanied her in the car.

“It was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and shades,” said Kathy Beltran, a deputy clerk who schedules judge pro tems in the Westminster court.

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Carpool lanes, or high-occupancy-vehicle lanes, as they are officially known, provide a good deal of the grist for dinner-table discussions. “It’s always generally the same story,” says Gary Shiffman, a Huntington Beach attorney who’s been serving as an acting judge for more than a year. “ ‘The traffic stopped so fast in front of me that the only way I could stop was by pulling into the HOV lane,’ they say. The answer, of course, is that they shouldn’t have been driving so fast in the first place that they wouldn’t be able to stop.”

One man admitted to having driven alone in the carpool lane but said that the white car the officer had spotted wasn’t his white car but another one, seemingly forgetting he would still be guilty. And a pregnant woman claimed to have the right to drive in the carpool lane because she really did have a passenger, one she carried with her everywhere. To underscore her argument, she brought the baby, now having left its passenger seat, to court.

“I told her that until the baby was out of her and viable she couldn’t claim it as a passenger,” Frank Barilla said.

Defendants don’t always lose.

Barilla, a 52-year-old attorney from Garden Grove, said he once dismissed the case against a motorist accused of illegally using the carpool lane after the man produced evidence that he had been rushing home to evacuate his family from the Laguna Beach fire. “You’ve got to use some discretion,” Barilla says he told the police officer involved. “You can’t just slam-dunk a guy.”

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Indeed, some judge pro tems say their decisions have sometimes alienated officers of the law. Sam Eagle, who admits to having a “leaning” toward defendants, says that one police officer became so incensed at a ruling that he rose to his fully uniformed 6-foot-6 height and, in a booming voice, demanded Eagle’s name and threatened to report him to the presiding judge.

“He was trying to bully and intimidate me,” says Eagle, 50, who practices law in Fountain Valley. “But I’m a Vietnam veteran and I can do Rambo as much as anybody else. I told him to take his best shot.”

In fact, Eagle says, the numerous appearances police have made before him have had an unanticipated benefit. “I know where they set up their radars,” he said.

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Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about traffic, commuting and what makes it difficult to get around in Orange County. Include simple sketches if helpful. Letters may be published in upcoming columns. Please write to David Haldane, c/o Street Smart, The Times Orange County Edition, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, send faxes to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail him at David.Haldane@latimes.com Include your full name, address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited, and no anonymous letters will be accepted.