Flashing headlights

A New Zealand teenager showing some skin brought traffic to a standstill after an appreciative driver ran her over.

Dared by her friends, Cherelle May Dudfield, 18, was flashing passing motorists from a traffic island in the middle of a four-lane road in September. It was all very funny until one enraptured motorist crashed into her, sending her rolling onto the hood of the car and cracking the windshield.

Fortunately Dudfield suffered only minor injuries and was fined $200 for disorderly behavior. Her attorney suggested that the driver involved could have been a little more careful, but conceded that he may have been “distracted.”

Dudfield said the incident taught her an important life lesson. “Don’t get drunk and stand in the middle of the road and flash anyone,” she said, “’cause it hurts when you get hit.”

Youthful exuberance

A civic-minded citizen in northern Germany was promptly arrested after using a front-end loader to clear his street from a Christmas Eve snowfall.

The fact that he was only 7 years old might have had something to do with it.

Patrol officers noticed the boy atop the 11.5-ft-tall excavator as he was driving it back to his parents’ business.

When the officers attempted to pull him over, the child immediately stopped, got out and admitted that he didn’t have a driver’s license.

The boy later told police that he had heard his father complaining about the condition of the roads and decided to help after finding the key in the ignition of the loader. His parents were touched, and then immediately grounded him for the next 11 years.

Sounds sensible

Diesel owners everywhere breathed a sigh of relief in December when an Ohio judge ruled that police cannot issue a ticket just because a car sounds like it’s speeding.

Sounds like common sense, but Daniel Freitag has been fighting a speeding ticket on those grounds for the last two years.

In 2007, patrolman Ken Roth clocked Freitag doing 42 mph in a 35-mph zone in West Salem, Ohio. Freitag appealed his ticket and won when it was discovered that the radar evidence was improperly admitted.

However the case was remanded rather than dismissed because Roth also had testified to another basis for the ticket: He could tell that Freitag’s 2006 Lincoln Navigator was traveling 7 mph over the speed limit because it sounded too fast.

Roth testified that he had learned to “audibly determine if a vehicle was speeding” as part of his field training several years before.

Remarkably, the trial court accepted this testimony, and found Freitag guilty.

Freitag appealed again, this time countering with the equally ridiculous defense that it was “completely impossible” for him to have been speeding because he is “aware that the police constantly patrol U.S. 42.” His wife, who also was in the car when the ticket was issued, supported him by testifying that he “never exceeds the speed limit in West Salem or anywhere else.”

This time an Ohio Appeals Court judge ruled in Freitag’s favor, reversing his conviction and calling the trial judge’s ruling a “manifest miscarriage of justice.”

Once again we see the most important principle of the American justice system at work: A defendant is innocent until proven guilty, even if his defense is no more plausible than the allegation.