Is flashing your headlights illegal or a free speech issue?

Alexis Cason with her car, in front of her Oviedo home. Cason was ticketed for flashing her headlights at oncoming motorists to warn them that a cop was around the bend. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda, Orlando Sentinel)

By Rene Stutzman, Orlando Sentinel

9:57 p.m. EDT, August 26, 2011
SANFORD — Alexis Cason was on her way to school one morning when she spotted two Oviedo police officers on the side of the road. She flashed her headlights to warn other drivers about the speed trap ahead. Moments later, another cop pulled her over and wrote her a ticket, saying she'd just broken the law by flashing her lights.

Law, she asked, what law?

Cason, 22, challenged the ticket and won. A lawsuit filed this week claims that 2,900 motorists were ticketed — illegally — in Florida for the same thing from 2005 to 2010.

An Oviedo law firm — the same one that persuaded a Seminole County judge to toss Cason's ticket — is asking a judge in Tallahassee to bar Florida cops from writing tickets when motorists flash their headlights.

There is no Florida law that prohibits light-flashing, said Oviedo attorney J. Marcus Jones. He claims officers are simply twisting a law that was designed to prohibit drivers from adding after-market emergency lights to their vehicles.

When officers write those tickets, he said, they violate a driver's constitutional right to free speech. If motorists want to flash their lights to warn about a speed trap ahead, they are free to do so, according to his suit.

The suit, filed Wednesday, asks Circuit Judge James O. Shelfer in Tallahassee to certify the case as a class action on behalf of every motorist in Florida who was ticketed for that offense from 2005 to 2010.

It also asks Shelfer to issue an injunction, banning all Florida cops from writing those tickets, to reimburse drivers for the fines they've paid and to rule that officers are misapplying a law about add-on emergency lights.

The state has not yet responded to the suit.

"We don't comment on any pending lawsuit that we're involved in," said Capt. Mark Welch of the Florida Highway Patrol.

The lead plaintiff is Erich Campbell, 38, a Tampa-area man who was ticketed two years ago by a state trooper.

"At $100, nobody challenges these nonmoving violations," he said. "It's a principle thing to me."

He did some research and discovered that Cason had successfully fought back, so he hired the same law firm and, he, too, got a judge to toss the ticket.

According to the suit, "There was no legitimate basis for pulling over Campbell's vehicle and detaining him and his passengers when they had committed no cognizable offense."

Cops who write those tickets, according to the suit, engage in behavior that is "illegal, wrongful and unconstitutional." They subject motorists to unwarranted seizures — the money they must pay in traffic fines — the suit alleges.

They also are guilty of racketeering, the suit alleges, "an ongoing enterprise … (of) theft, misuse of office and extortion," according to the suit.

Authorities should have taken note six years ago when Seminole County Judge Donald Marblestone threw out Cason's ticket, declaring the statute has nothing to do with a driver using his headlights to warn about police activity, the suit alleges.

The FHP and the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles could not say how many tickets Florida cops write each year for that offense.

Jones' law firm has challenged five headlight-flashing tickets in five Florida counties in the past six years and prevailed each time, according to the suit. Those include Seminole, Osceola, Hillsborough, Escambia and St. Lucie counties.

Jones hopes to win again soon in Seminole.

Two weeks ago his firm filed a similar suit — but smaller in scope — in state Circuit Court in Sanford. It alleges that the Seminole County Sheriff's Office violated the free speech rights of Ryan Kintner, a 25-year-old Lake Mary man, when a deputy discovered him using his headlights to tip off neighbors about a speed trap near his home.

"I felt an injustice was being done," Kintner said. "I have nothing against officers … keeping speeding down, but when you cross a line and get into free speech, I feel it's gone too far."

His suit asks Circuit Judge Alan Dickey to order the Seminole County Sheriff's Office to stop writing those tickets.

Seminole deputies will keep on writing them as long as the statute is in effect, according to Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Kim Cannaday.

rstutzman@tribune.com or 407-650-6394.

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