Man Faces Seven Years in Prison for Videotaping Traffic Stop
June 12th, 2007Do as we say, not as we do.
Via: Pennlive:
Brian D. Kelly, 18, of Carlisle likely isn’t the only the person around central Pennsylvania who was unaware that recording a police officer during the commission of a traffic stop constitutes a felony criminal act.
Kelly, who says one of his hobbies is making movies, had his camera rolling last month when the pickup truck he was riding in was pulled over by a Carlisle police officer for traffic violations. About 20 minutes into the police stop, the officer noticed that Kelly had a camera pointed at him and told him to turn it off, which he did. Kelly was then charged with felony wiretapping, which carries a penalty of up to seven years in state prison. The young man spent 26 hours in Cumberland County Prison before his mother posted her house to bail him out.
The logic of interpreting the wiretap law to make it a felony to record police carrying out their duties escapes us, given that increasingly police themselves record traffic stops.
Research Credit: MT
But if you are president, you can get away with this list scott-free.
http://www.netrootsmass.net/Hugh/Bush_list.html
because there are just too many scandals to remember…
Wire tap laws should in not apply because you’re in no way using a public utility while in the act of recording. By this absurd stretch of illogic you could in effect be charged with wiretapping at any time and at any place simply by claiming that undercover agents were present. So I guess you can’t even be filming the kids in a park or even Disyneyland by that definition.
One does reckless driving around and gets 40 days and plenty of publicity. Another one films a police officer, and faces 7 years in prison. Is it just me, or is there something wrong in that picture?
The “law” is the mask, sometimes a terribly unconvincing mask. The reality is the authorities do whatever the fuck they want.
Odd, since many attorneys actual advise recording the traffic stop to use as possible evidence in court.
In this case, the police officer noticed the camera and continued – this is tacit acceptance that he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy and the legal basis for the illegality of wiretapping is invasion of privacy (at least according to the police in this case). Using their logic, law enforcement video taping of a traffic stop is itself illegal, since both parties did not agree to it. In addition, the pickup truck is, itself, the private personal property of the driver, and previous cases have already established that you can film from their own private property (per Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject).
He’ll walk, assuming he can get decent legal council (in the US, it is strictly the best justice money can buy…ask Paris Hilton), and either way once again we see more Gestapo-like behavior on the part of so-called “law enforcement” personnel.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
relayed to me via a PA private investigator:
PA is an all party state, if you record any conversation without the consent of all parties thereto you are committing a felony.The boy is not going to be charged with this felony.The department is going to reduce or drop the charge due to lack of criminal intent on the part of the dumb kid.
He COMPLIED w/the officers request if the charges are not dropped this is a travesty
(my own personal experiences with the “system”
lead me to think the whole shebang stinks to the core).
Methink’s either the Cop had “Macho LEO syndrome”
or the kid was babbling a bunch of stuff about Rodney King or police brutality as the officer
ran the driver thru the stop process.
John, that still doesn’t explain what an all party conversation means. Are you talking about a conversation “over a wire”, meaning telephone, or are you meaning sitting in my own vehicle, on my tax supported streets, talking to another purported “servant” in a fancy costume that I paid for? Seems the term “wiretap” as used by the cop is silly to begin with. Thats a stretch by any imagination.