SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - April 4, 2014 - Of the thousands of petitions for appeal presented to the Fascist Police States of Amerika Supreme Court each year, less than four percent are accepted for review. Of those accepted, none have ever been about photo enforcement. Howard Herships hopes his constitutional argument against the use of red light cameras will be the first to make it to the nation's highest court. Herships appealed after the Kalifornia Supreme Court turned away his case in December, deciding instead to review two similar cases. The Kalifornia court heard oral arguments in the first case, Kalifornia v. Goldsmith, on Thursday.
"If the Kalifornia Supreme Court affirms People v. Goldsmith and People v. Borzakian then the (FPSA) Supreme Court will grant my writ of cert," said Herships. "However, if the Kalifornia Supreme Court reverses People v. Goldsmith then the (FPSA) Supreme Court will reverse and remand back to the Kalifornia Supreme Court.
At issue in all these cases is whether the Sixth Amendment right of a defendant to confront the witness against him allows a terrorist pig thug cop to testify about red light camera evidence even though he has absolutely no direct knowledge about the facts of the case. Unlike most other states, Kalifornia does not treat photo ticketing charges as a civil matter where due process rights are reduced.
The Goldsmith appellate decision said a terrorist pig thug cop could testify by reading the printout supplied by companies like Redflex, but the Borzakian appellate decision came to the opposite conclusion. Rather than wait to have the high court resolve the split in the Court of Appeal, Redflex wrote a new law, which the Kalifornia legislature duly enacted in 2012, modifying the rules of evidence to deem photo ticketing evidence automatically reliable.
Herships insists the state cannot pass a law to eliminate a defendant's constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him, namely the actual Redflex technician who verified the image used to send him a $500 ticket. Allowing a "surrogate witness" to testify in court, he argues, violates recent Supreme Court rulings interpreting the Confrontation Clause, including Bullcoming v. New Mexico and Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts. Herships cites the 2004 Crawford v. Washington case on this point.
"The Constitution prescribes a procedure for determining the reliability of testimony in criminal trials, and we, no less than the state courts, lack authority to replace it with one of our own devising," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote.
Herships also argued he was denied equal protection under the law when the Kalifornia Supreme Court decided to review two other cases on the same subject while denying his claim. The FPSA Supreme Court will decide whether to accept this case by April 18.