Red-light cameras yield for high court

In the south suburb of Markham, the intersection at 159th Street and Kedzie Avenue presents two four-lane roads flanked by fast-food restaurants and a drug store. Head west and you’ll hit Interstate 57; drive east and you’ll find Interstate 294.

It appears exceedingly ordinary.

Yet, in a few months, it could cost local governments hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That intersection is where Liz Keating was flagged by a camera for rolling through a stoplight while making a right turn.

It’s where she got the $100 ticket in February 2010 that sparked a class-action lawsuit from drivers who’d been ticketed by cameras in Chicago and suburbs such as Markham. And now that challenge is before the Illinois Supreme Court.

If the high court rules her way, it could cause more than a decade’s worth of red-light camera tickets and fines in Illinois to be kicked to the curb.

On that day, Keating was driving her teenage daughter, Isabelle, back from surgery after she broke her wrist on a church ski trip.

“The morphine was wearing off,” Keating said. “Every time the car moved, she screamed in agony.”

With that in mind, Keating was trying not to jerk the car to a sudden stop. She said she rolled slowly up to the light, stopped briefly, then made a right turn.

“I did not do anything illegal, I am absolutely confident. I would have done the same thing in front of a police officer,” Keating said.

The background

The camera program in Chicago has been the source of several controversies during its lifespan — camera vendor Redflex Traffic Systems, for instance, allegedly bribed officials in Chicago and 13 other states to get its business, and questions remain about city numbers that showed a dramatic decline in deaths near camera locations.

The number of political quarrels the program has caused is perhaps trumped only by the number of headaches it’s given drivers who’ve been captured in an intersection as the traffic signal changed from yellow to red. Estimates vary, but the city has likely collected more than $400 million in fines since the program was enacted.

But the class-action suit filed in 2011 by Patrick J. Keating, Liz’s husband, on behalf of her and the others claims that the cameras had other issues.

The suit contends the technology’s implementation conflicted with state statutes that sought to keep driving policies consistent across Illinois. It also says a subsequent state law enabling Chicago’s ordinance — and the installation of cameras in collar counties and the Metro East area near St. Louis — was arbitrarily localized and, therefore, in conflict with the state constitution.

A spokesman for the City of Chicago Law Department declined to comment on the case, which the Supreme Court accepted in September and is currently in the briefing stage, awaiting an oral argument date.

Keating, managing partner of Keating Law Group LLC, said simply that he and his team “expect the Supreme Court will agree that the city enacted its program without legal authority and that the later-enacted statute does not validate its program and is a clear example of unconstitutional local legislation.”

But in lower court rulings and the filings in the case — Elizabeth Keating, et al., etc., v. City of Chicago, etc., No. 116054 — both sides paint a clear picture of their arguments, while the legislative history of the state law illuminates the politics behind a process that, in 2006, created what became one of the most salient issues for the high court in 2014.

The Chicago ordinance

To the plaintiffs, the issue couldn’t be simpler.

“Few things are expressed more clearly in Illinois law,” they write in their brief to the high court, “than that traffic regulations governing the movement of vehicles must be uniform throughout the state.”

The consistency of the “rules of the road” is codified in both the state’s vehicle and municipal laws, they argue, which also require that red-light violations be flagged by police officers, proceed through the circuit court system and be reported to the Illinois secretary of state.

Chicago’s red-light ordinance, on the other hand, administers tickets without police officers, the circuit courts or the secretary of state. Keating contends the discrepancy is “in plain violation of the uniformity provisions discussed above.”

The administrative adjudication of so-called “moving violations” is also explicitly forbidden by the city’s municipal code, Keating argues.

But are the red-light cameras actually regulating movement?

Last year, Justice Aurelia Pucinski and the 1st District Appellate Court said they didn’t believe so, siding with the city of Chicago while affirming then-Cook County Circuit Judge Michael B. Hyman’s decision to toss the suit.

To be clear, Hyman threw out the suit on another cause — that the aggrieved motorists had implicated the “voluntary payment doctrine” by paying their fines before taking the matter to court, thus losing standing to sue.

The appeals court disagreed on that point, saying only two of the motorists lacked standing because they received red-light tickets outside of Chicago, while the rest could sue because they would have been subjected to significant fines if they hadn’t paid.

Pucinski, however, said the cameras weren’t really regulating movement because, though they are triggered by movement, “the camera is capturing a moment in time depicting the vehicle’s use in disobeying a red-light signal.”

Keating pointed out that whether the camera is only capturing a single moment in time shouldn’t matter — “the rule being enforced can only apply to a vehicle that is moving in the first place” — and that the appellate court’s rationale really just amounted to intellectual jiujitsu.

“It defies logic to suggest that Chicago may enforce red-light violations through administrative procedures so long as its cameras only record still images — especially where, as here, the [c]ity’s [p]rogram also records a video clip of the alleged infraction,” the brief says.

Trying to dissuade the high court from taking up the case, the city called Keating’s argument against the ordinance “an entirely academic subject” because all named plaintiffs received tickets after the state enabled the program in 2006.

“Here, petitioners were not harmed by the [c]ity’s exercise of its home-rule authority because they did not receive tickets between 2003 and 2006 before the General Assembly expressly authorized the [c]ity’s red-light camera program,” wrote Kerrie E. Maloney Laytin, a city staff attorney. “Thus, their challenge to the [c]ity’s 2003-06 authority is nothing more than a request for an advisory opinion.”

The state statute

Sen. John J. Cullerton did “everything short of back handsprings” to ensure that Chicago’s red-light cameras were authorized by state law and spread to neighboring areas.

At least, that’s how Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno described it on March 29, 2006 — the day Cullerton, a Democrat from Chicago, introduced his legislation (House Bill 4835) and passed it on the Senate floor in a 31-23 vote.

The move allowed cities in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, Madison, McHenry, St. Clair and Will counties to opt in to using red-light cameras.

The bill was the second of its kind during that session. The first, House Bill 21, would have authorized red-light cameras across the state (it failed, only netting 24 of the 30 votes needed for passage in the Senate).

Although Cullerton answered a slew of questions that day, his response to the first one, from Sen. Dale A. Righter, a Republican from Mattoon — “Why did you pick these particular counties?” — played the dual role of being the most important as well as one of the most politically revealing.

“Well, the way this works is it — it would only be used and utilized in areas where they have a lot of traffic because the cameras themselves cost something like 90 to 100,000 dollars,” said Cullerton, who became president of the Senate in 2008.

“So, at the request of some [m]embers in the — from both parties in the Transportation Committee, they indicated they didn’t want to have this option in their counties, so we limited it to the more populous counties.”

Keating seized on those tidbits in arguing that the law violates the state’s constitution, which prohibits “special” or “local” laws in cases when a more general law is possible.

“The inability to pass a general law does not then permit the legislature to make a special or local law,” Keating wrote.

The plaintiffs added that having red-light cameras in only the eight counties permitted by the statute leads to arbitrary results. Although the city uses municipal powers as a justification for the law, the plaintiffs argued, the law itself is framed in terms of counties.

“Thus, Symington (Pop. 87), a small rural village, is permitted to install red-light cameras because it is in Will County,” the plaintiffs wrote.

“But because (the law)’s designation does not distinguish on the basis of municipal population, congestion, traffic patterns or vehicle accidents, cities like Springfield and Peoria, pedestrian-dense college towns like Champaign-Urbana and Bloomington and rapidly-growing suburbs like Oswego, may not enjoy the financial and claimed safety benefits of red-light cameras because they are in the ‘wrong’ counties.”

The city said that really doesn’t matter — the only thing the city needs to do is survive the “rational basis test.”

“The act applies to eight of the nine most populous counties in the [s]tate and the municipalities located in those counties — all of which immediately surround the two largest cities in the region, Chicago and St. Louis,” the city wrote, adding that it was a “quite rational” conclusion for the legislature to make.

In a few months, they’ll know whether the Illinois Supreme Court agrees. And whether that intersection at 159th and Kedzie will be responsible for a whole lot of $100 refunds.