criminal-law california traffic civil-law fifth-amendment
Signal violation in vehicle not owned by driver
<p>Guy runs a red light in a vehicle he doesn't own. Owner gets all the information and a slip to identify the driver. Can the owner just send a letter like this and have the violation(s) dropped:</p>
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<p>I, the owner of said vehicle, am not the driver (see attached redacted copy of driver's license) in the photo provided. I will not be held to answer for the driver.</p>
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<p>The driver and the owner are friends. This all took place in California. Both people are Californian residents.</p>
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<p>Some relevant exposition:</p>
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<p>Yet traffic cameras do not always produce probable cause that a particular person has committed a crime. To get around this “problem” (as a certain law-and-order president-elect might call it), several states have created an entirely novel phylum of law: the civil violation of a criminal prohibition. Using this nifty device, a city can charge you of a crime without any witnesses, without any probable cause determination, and without any civil due process.</p>
<p>In short, municipal officials and their private contractors have at their disposal the powers of both criminal and civil law and are excused from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law. It’s a neat trick that would have made King George III blush. - <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/01/18093/" rel="noreferrer">Adam J. MacLeod</a></p>
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<p>It's interesting too, that the driver identification slip is not to be sent to the county in which the violation occurred, but to the location of the traffic system's place of business, which is in another state.</p>
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<p><sub>Also, if you're interested, maybe you could help come up with something clever to put in the &quot;For:&quot; section of the check I'll most likely end up writing. I'm thinking &quot;due process&quot; with a line through it.</sub></p>

<p>Sending a letter to the red light camera company or police department may or may not get the charge dropped before trial. But whether the charge gets dropped before trial isn't the important question -- after all, people sometimes do get charged wrongly -- rather, the question is, if it goes to trial, whether you will win.</p>

<p>Since this question is about California, all traffic tickets in California, including red light camera tickets, are criminal cases (that's why the case will be named "People of the State of California v. [your name]" in court documents). The burden of proof is on the prosecution, and the standard of evidence is "beyond a reasonable doubt". There is no provision in California law to fine or otherwise punish the owner of a vehicle for a moving violation, except through a conviction as the driver who committed the violation.</p>

<p>If you plead not guilty and it goes to trial, the burden will be on the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the driver was you. If the driver in the picture does not look like you, there is no way they can meet that burden, and the court must find you not guilty. (In most cases the prosecution will immediately drop the case when they discover that the picture does not look like you.) Note that you have an absolute right to not testify in your own criminal trial where you are the defendant, so there is no way they can force you to testify at the trial about who the driver was if it was not you (which would be irrelevant to the case against you anyhow).</p>

<p>If you do not say who the driver was, and the police department fail to guess who it was (e.g. by searching for drivers whose licenses share the same address as you for someone who looks like the one in the picture), then nobody gets fined or punished for the violation. This is true even if you know full well who the driver was, or even if you were pictured sitting right next to them. You don't need to claim not to know who the driver was, because whether you know or not doesn't matter -- you have no legal obligation to tell the identity of the driver even if you know, and you cannot be fined or otherwise punished for the violation if you intentionally refuse to tell.</p>
