Sunday, June 27, 2010
News, In this Issue..., Politics, Atlanta
TTYL!
Georgia’s new ban on texting while driving goes into effect July 1. Here’s what you need to know.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Heather Dowdy (right) tries to text while using the Don't TXT & Drive simulator at the LG Electronics booth at the International CTIA Wireless 2010 convention in March.
“Were they dialing a phone number or were they texting?”—Gordy Wright, Ga. Dept. of Public Safety
Statewide ban on texting while driving goes into effect July 1.
The Georgia State Patrol will observe a 30-to-60 day grace period in which any violations encountered will usually result in a warning.
If cited for violating the new law, a driver may pay a $150 fine and will incur a penalty of one point on his/her license.
By Mark Woolsey
The summer Friday night traffic on Peachtree Street was thick and getting thicker. The light at 17th Street turned green, and the car ahead in the right lane stayed stock-still. Angry drivers blared their horns and began pulling around, nearly causing a couple of accidents.
The culprit? A young woman dressed for an evening out who spent an entire green light cycle all thumbs—madly texting and oblivious to the chaos and near-disaster she caused.
Theoretically, that behavior comes to an end—at least from a legal standpoint—as of July 1, when a bill signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue banning texting while driving takes effect. The Caleb Sorohan Act, named for a Morgan County teen who died texting behind the wheel, can cost a driver a $150 fine and a penalty of one point on his or her license.
The newly minted law faces an uncertain legal future on several fronts. How enforceable will it be? Both safety advocates and law enforcement sources say making the law stick will be tough. Some questions remain to be answered by the courts, including: What constitutes probable cause to stop a driver suspected of texting? How far can police go in questioning a suspected texter? Do the cops have the right to examine a cell phone found on the floorboard at a crash scene to see if texting was underway, or do they need a search warrant? How can witnesses be sure an accused texter wasn’t simply looking at the number of an incoming call?
It’s that last legal point that concerns the governor, who noted that when a phone buzzes, the driver won’t know if it’s an incoming phone call or a text.
“The governor said that he thought that the manipulation of the keys should be the illegal act,” says Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley, “not the receipt of a text message, where if you don’t respond back generally that conversation ends.”
The governor thinks that making the act of looking at a phone screen criminal could lead to a rise in lawsuits and prosecutions, as well. “A lot of trial lawyers might want to subpoena phone records and assign blame for every accident that happens,” is how Brantley puts it.
Gov. Perdue urged lawmakers to come back and take a hard look at the law in the 2011 legislative session, with a view to revising the part about reading texts.
Texting bans, now in effect in various forms in 28 states, have drawn wide support from law enforcement, highway safety advocates and even the cell phone industry. But there are questions about how they work in practice. Enforcement may not be as straightforward as making a traffic stop because a cop saw a head intently bent over something in a weaving car. There’s a feeling that Georgia’s law will migrate up the legal food chain as attorneys defend against local cases, with some questions ultimately decided by the Georgia Supreme Court.
For a case to stand up in court, says Gordy Wright, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Public Safety, “the manner of driving would in all probability be the most telling probable cause for a traffic stop. When texting, you’re distracted from watching the road and you tend to mimic the habits of an impaired driver, jerking the wheel, leaving the roadway, crossing the center line and so forth.
“If you pull a driver over and find out that they are not an impaired driver, under the influence,” he continues, “and you start asking questions, someone might admit to texting. And admitting would be one of the factors that would support a citation. The gray area is going to be a person having a phone in their hand. Were they dialing a phone number or were they texting?”
ENFORCEMENT WILL BE DIFFICULT
It’s that kind of uncertainty that’s led the Tennessee Highway Patrol to take a conservative approach to enforcement. Tennessee’s texting-while-driving law went into effect last July, and since Jan. 1 of this year the THP has issued only 74 texting citations statewide.
“The challenge is that from a law-enforcement perspective, we want to make sure that we are actually seeing the person texting while driving or reading a text while driving,” says THP Spokesman Mike Browning.
Bob Dallas, spokesman for the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, says it’s not far-fetched that a driver intent on texting urgent-seeming messages might be so distracted that an officer pulls up in close proximity and observes fingers actually on the keys or a cell phone being held up, regardless of whether the person is driving recklessly. Unlike some states, Georgia’s law is “primary,” meaning someone can be stopped for simply texting; cops don’t have to observe another violation like reckless driving first.
“You’re going to be pulled over,” Dallas says. “And then that officer is trained to ask questions that elicit information that might lead to him issuing a citation. … These officers do this all the time, and they’ll develop a skill set that allows them to do a better job of enforcing the law. It’s like, how do I distinguish that someone might be driving down the road with a glass of soda, which is OK, as opposed to a glass of bourbon and soda, which is not OK? The officer investigates and makes the stop and can assess whether alcohol is involved. The officer can assess for such things as an aroma of alcohol and slurred speech.”
Dallas says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is conducting a study in Delaware and Connecticut, working with local law enforcement groups to come up with “best practices” on texting enforcement, with the results due to be shared across the country.
“We are still in the process of learning how to enforce the texting ban,” he says.
The Department of Public Safety’s Wright concurs that enforcement will largely hinge on the officer’s judgment.
“What we are telling troopers is that, as with any violation they observe, can they go to court and testify that what they observed during a traffic stop or leading up to a traffic stop supports the citation?” says Wright. “That’s going to be a key, relying on a trooper’s judgment during a traffic stop.”
Nevertheless, says Michael Sheffield, an Atlanta attorney who specializes in traffic enforcement cases, some legal issues coming out of the ban will have to be decided in court, with perhaps the state’s highest court eventually weighing in.
“Say the police stop someone for an improper lane change,” he says, “and they see a cell phone. Do they have the right to routinely question the driver as to whether they were texting, or to examine the cell phone? Would they have to get a search warrant?”
Sheffield calls the statute a “good law,” but says “there are aspects that will have to be interpreted by the courts.”
Tennessee’s Browning says police there are pulling cell phone company records in an attempt to learn whether someone might have been busy texting around the time of an accident. The problem then becomes trying to prove in court that the offender was texting at the exact time of the crash, not minutes before or after.
Statewide authorities in Georgia plan to ease into enforcement of the new law. Wright says troopers will observe a 30-to-60 day grace period. Any violations encountered will usually result in a warning, using the next couple of months as an educational period.
Law enforcement and safety advocates emphasize that a two-pronged approach of stringent enforcement and continuing education—similar to the “Click It or Ticket” campaign for wearing seat belts—will be needed to “set the societal norm that it’s not OK to text and drive,” as Dallas puts it. He thinks developing that widespread norm will take less time than was necessary with seat belt campaigns.
Jonathan Adkins, whose group Governors Highway Safety Association represents governor’s safety associations across the country, credits the “Click It” campaign, combined with stringent enforcement in the mid and late ’90s, with boosting seat belt usage by 15 to 20 percent. He says similar results can happen with text-messaging, citing an upcoming federally funded demonstration project in Connecticut and New York combining public service announcements and other media outreach with stiff enforcement of restrictions on hand-held cell phone use and texting. He says those states’ programs can be models for others.
Such programs can come none too soon, says Dallas.
“Studies show that some teenagers are texting more than talking on phones,” he says, “and you have to realize this behavior is going on behind the wheel and this is a distraction that if we didn’t get to it now and waited 10 years, we would be telling them to undo behavior that was OK for 10 years.”
And it’s life-threatening behavior. According to study results released by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute last summer, drivers who text are 23 times as likely to get into a crash or “near-crash event” as non-distracted drivers.
Georgia officials say they have no idea how many citations might be written under the ban. But if the statistics from Tennessee are any indication, the numbers won’t be high.
An investigation by WSB-TV found that DeKalb County’s ban on cell phone use while driving, heretofore one of very few on the books in Georgia, resulted in only 22 cases presented in state court and 105 in the recorder’s court in the past four years. The law says that drivers who cause an accident while talking on a cell phone can be prosecuted and fined. The trick is proving that’s what was happening.
Law enforcement and legal experts in Georgia say that hurdle may well be significant with the texting ban, making the law difficult, but by no means impossible, to enforce.
“It’s going to be a learning experience for everyone,” says Wright. SP