On Thursday evening before the Martin Luther King weekend I was driving from Nashville, TN to Pittsburgh, PA to visit my brother. I was in a compact Ford rental car which had Missouri plates on it. Early in the evening it was raining before I had left TN. I tried pushing the car in the high 70s just outside of Nashville where the speed limit is posted at 70mph. But the car was a compact and when it was going fast it was liable to get shaky especially passing large trucks.
So I kept the car at a steady 70-75mph most of the way except in the case where I was going to have to take an exit on the highway. About 250 miles into my 560 mile drive I am on I-71/I-75 north in northern Kentucky, Boone county, which is a county on the Kentucky-Ohio border. It is around 11-midnight and there isn't much traffic, basically driving by myself all night. Using my Yahoo Map directions I am aware
I will have to take a right where I-71/I-75 continues onto Wheeling, West Virginia. I am driving and no one is in front or behind me approaching the turn. Just as I am taking the ramp making the long turn a car drives into my rear-view with
no lights on. I continue on the ramp keeping an eye on the car which I can only make out the silhouette barely. After taking the ramp the
shadow car is still in my rear-view. At this point I am much slower since you have to go slower to take exits or ramps. The car seems
suspicious so I slow down somewhat to see what it is doing and let it pass if that is necessary. When I start to slow down all of a sudden all of the car's lights turn on plus
police lights.
All this time it was a state trooper. He pulls me over and I sit there waiting thinking, "it better not because of my out of state plates." He comes up to the car and asks the usual question, "do you know why I pulled you over." I answered I had no idea. I believe they ask that question so that people who are nervous or do not know better just blurt out a bunch of things making it easy for them. He then tells me that I was going
84mph some
5-7 miles back down the road.
First of all the compact car shakes at 80mph+, plus the engine is at 3,000rpms just to do that.
Also he tells me a long story of how 2 cars ahead of me were only going 75mph and he radar gunned me at 84mph. I was making good time going 75mph the whole trip, when was I going 84. Also I knew I was going to have to turn or take an exit or a fork in the highway within that period so I would not be speeding anywhere I would have to make a decision on where to go in a new area I had never been.
I tell him I have no memory of any place 5 or 7 miles back where I was speeding. He then proceeds to tell me that he was behind me for mile before the ramp and that he flashed me in my rear-view with his lights.
This is were I knew he was lying. There was no car behind me until his
shadow car, lights completely turned off, pulled in behind me just as I approached the ramp. His lights were only on when he turned
all of them on when I slowed downed after taking the ramp.
He takes my license and the rental car information and takes it to his car. Five to ten minutes later he comes back to my car and hands me a
citation and piece of paper with some directions on court or payment.
He tells me that in Kentucky if you are going 20mph over the speed limit you can automatically loose 3 points off your license so he told me he was doing me a favor and only wrote the ticket for going 80mph. I believe he told me this because he wanted me to be thankful to
getting off easy. That definitely raised my suspicion. The ticket was for
$189. I asked if I could get out of this ticket because I was just going to visit my brother and I do not believe I could ever be going 80mph or 84mph in this compact car that shakes at high speed; he directed me to the paper with the information. He told me how he did me one more
favor be giving me a court date that was 1 full month away.
So he gets back into his car and I sit there looking at the ticket and the other paper. First I notice that the paper with the outline of the fines does not have anything at $189 or $180 related to speeding. The fine for going 15mph over the speed limit at 80mph was
$175.
Then I read over the ticket a little more and I notice that on the ticket he marked me as a
White non-Hispanic. This was extremely surprising since I am a dark African-American with an African last name. I mean he filled out the other information about the color of my eyes and hair from my license but put me as
white non-hispanic. My first reaction was how easy I should be able to beat the ticket because of this
mistake. The next evening I tell my brother about the ticket over dinner. After the weekend was over and I returned to Nashville on Monday my brother calls me and suggests something that I had not thought of yet.
He thought that the trooper possibly mislabeled me as white non-hispanic instead of black or african-american so that when someone else goes over the tickets the numbers would be lower for stopages of Blacks on the highway. That made a lot more sense than a trooper with years of experience making this unbelievable mistake. So now I am here waiting for my court date, thinking if I can call someone for help. Maybe the FBI since they keep track of such data of state racial profiling. Possibly the ACLU or a lawyer in Kentucky. Who knows.
