Sanction on town ticketing fought
Speed- trap rules hazy, lawyer says
CONWAY — The state’s speed- trap law is unclear about who has the authority to investigate and hand down sanctions, the city attorney for Damascus said in a newly filed court document.
The amended petition, filed by attorney Beau Wilcox, asked a Faulkner County circuit judge to overturn a prosecutor’s findings that the small town operated a speed trap, and asked to overturn the prosecutor’s sanctions against the town that lies along U. S. 65 in Faulkner and Van Buren counties.
About 2 miles of U. S. 65, which includes traffic to Branson, runs through the town of roughly 400 residents.
In May, Judge Chris Carnahan dismissed the city’s petition to let its officers patrol the highways pending a resolution of the city’s lawsuit challenging Prosecuting Attorney Cody Hiland’s decision.
Earlier in May, Hiland, who had already determined the town was running a speed trap, ordered the Damascus Police Department to cease patrolling traffic on affected highways until the end of his term as the 20th Judicial Circuit’s prosecutor, at the end of 2018.
Officers from both counties’ sheriff’s offices and the Arkansas State Police are currently patrolling those highways. After one year, the city may petition the prosecutor’s office and request a review of any publicsafety concerns that result from the decision.
The amended petition, filed Friday, argued the speed- trap law “is even profoundly unclear, arguably to a fatal extent, as to who exactly has authority to act with respect to the inquiry and sanctions provisions.”
Hiland acted properly in initiating the inquiry, but the Arkansas State Police should have forwarded data from its resulting investigation, not to Hiland as it did, but “to the prosecutor for Damascus” to make a determination, Wilcox said. Wilcox did not identify that prosecutor by name.
Hiland’s office oversees the 20th Judicial Circuit, which includes Faulkner, Van Buren and Searcy counties.
In a statement Monday, Hiland said his office has passed the amended complaint on to the Arkansas attorney general’s office “for its review and response.”
The amended petition also said state law provides no information on time limitations for any such sanctions and said the law does not vest the
prosecuting attorney with the “discretion as to the length and severity of the sanctions.”
“The sanctions issued on May 10, 2017, underscore the various faults and deficiencies present in the statute that render it unconstitutional,” Wilcox wrote.
Wilcox also argued that state law provides no means of due process for challenging Hiland’s findings, short of a lawsuit.
Hiland offered the city a 30- day response period “as a courtesy,” Wilcox said. But any response by Damascus “would be a desperate plea for Hiland to alter his own findings, rather than an appropriately pleaded, argued, and heard action in the presence of a neutral third party vested with decision- making authority.”