[kellynla]

“So who do they ticket?

We have four drivers in our family.”

From the article:

When there is no age or gender match in San Diego, police can either discard the ticket or investigate further to see if they can identify who was driving. Sometimes they’ll compare the red light runner’s photo with DMV photos of other people living in the same house, San Diego Police Sgt. Joe Bane said.

“We don’t send it to court unless you match the photo,” Bane said. “They’re very stringent in the courts as far as what can be filed.”

But in Orange County and several others jurisdictions across the state, the court doesn’t require police to verify that the person in the photo is the person ticketed. The vehicle code doesn’t require it, Slater says.

Instead, the ticket packet mailed to each motorist includes a form asking the car’s owner to identify the person who was driving. Giving up the real driver is not required by law, despite what the paperwork implies. The court expects that motorists will appear before a judge if they’re not the person pictured. The judge can decide whether the person standing in the courtroom looks like the person in the photo.

[Thud]

The legal error here is that a criminal penalty is involved, but there often is no evidence of who the driver was. So they demand that people incriminate themselves.

This is SOO vulnerable to a constitutional challenge.