Fine distinctions

I have a rhetorical question for you. I’m not expecting an answer. Just think about it.

If you represent a government agency that gets sued over a $50 fine by a self-represented individual, do you recommend a full-on defense that goes up to an appeals court? Wouldn’t that cost more than $50?

Ok, there might be a precedent to protect, but some precedents are more important than others.

With that in mind, I present to you a 23-page ruling from the District of Columbia Court of Appeals over whether a guy should have been fined $100 or $50 for speeding.

The guy represented himself. Five lawyers were listed as representatives of the District of Columbia.

The five lawyers lost.

The issue was whether the driver, caught by an automated speeding camera, was driving more or less than 11 miles over the speed limit. The fine for driving 11-15 miles over the limit was $100. Just 10.99 miles over the limit costs $50.

The camera claimed the driver was driving 61 in a 50 mph zone — but the camera had a one-mile margin of error so the real speed might have been 60.9 or less.

We learn two fascinating things in this ruling. One is that cameras are tested with tuning forks. I don’t know how but that explains why you’ve never heard a pitchy camera.

The other is this from a footnote: “(T)he odds that Ricciardi was traveling precisely 61 mph when photographed — and not one of the infinite fractions above or below it in the 60-62 mph range — are mathematically zero.”

So he may not have been travelling at any speed.

Don’t think too hard about this. You’ll get a headache.

It ain’t rocket science — or any kind of science. No matter your position on the use of hormone therapy and puberty blockers to treat underage transgender kids, you might think people debating the issue have scientific evidence to back up their arguments.

All right, of course you don’t think that. Plain old prejudice is the more likely reason for being against the treatments.

The Colorado Supreme Court in a ruling the other day on the issue noted that Children’s Hospital Colorado stopped providing hormone therapy and puberty blockers to transgender patients under 18 after the federal government threatened to withhold funding because Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. declared the treatments weren’t safe.

The next sentence in the ruling: “However, CHC continues to offer hormone therapy and puberty blockers to cisgender youth.”

Apparently they’re perfectly safe for straight kids.

Be careful about what you believe. With all the false information out there theses days, you’d think we’d all be careful about believing anything.

We aren’t.

A couple of very surprising examples of this have appeared in recent contradictory rulings.

A judge in New York has ruled that consumers should not have believed that gummies marketed as “comprehensive nutrition” were really comprehensively nutritious. “(T)he statement that the Gummies provide ‘comprehensive’ nutrition is a statement ‘upon which no reasonable buyer would be justified in relying.’”

Apparently, the plaintiffs were not being reasonable when they bought something they thought was good for them.

Meanwhile, a judge in Utah has ruled that a group of women can argue they were forced into being sex trafficked because they believed it was the only way to rescue other women and children from being sex trafficked.

The plaintiffs claim they believed that they had to have sex with the founder of an anti-human trafficking group as part of a “couples ruse” to infiltrate the real sex traffickers.

This court thought the plaintiff had a reasonable belief: “Because the assertion other women and children would remain in trafficking absent Plaintiffs’ participation in the Couple Ruse constitutes a threat ‘another person would suffer serious harm or physical restraint,’ Plaintiff sufficiently plead they were forced to provide labor.”

Perfectly reasonable. How else would you stop sex trafficking?

Make of this what you will.