VA Speeding Fines increasing...

[Ginger]

Are you anti-death penalty too because innocent people might be convincted?

Unjustly hit? For breaking the law? It's not like they didn't do it.

That's a pretty poor comparison. There are specific crimes which fit the bill for the death penalty. It's not appropriate to get into here, but the idea is that the punishment is proportional to the crime and the damaged caused. They don't execute people for toilet papering houses. If the intent of this law is to punish people who caused accidents by not using their signals than it needs to be explicitly written that way. This leaves people who simply didn't use their signal punishable by a thousand dollar fine - legally and without recourse.

Do I have to illustrate the problem? In ancient Rome Nero debased the currency to such an extreme that it wsa effectively worthless - he then punished Roman citizens who would not accept the official currency of the Roman empire as payment in private and public debts by death. Yeah, that's fair. They did the crime, after all.

As the law states if I turn without signaling an officer can give me a thousand dollar ticket and there's nothing I can do about it. I could go to court and the judge could, if he were feeling like making an example of me (or just in a bad mood) "too bad, that's the fine for this infractiom." Is that fair?