DA to drop 230 speeding tickets

ASHEVILLE – A prosecutor will dismiss about 230 speeding tickets city police wrote using radar guns with out-of-date certifications.

District Attorney Ron Moore said he planned to file the dismissals on Thursday.

City police completed a review of 4,500 tickets on Oct. 17. Officers found about 2,000 had been issued base on speed measuring devices, such as radar guns. Of that amount, 336 came from devices with lapsed certifications.

A staffer in the DA's office spent days going through citations, Moore said. About 80 had already been dismissed for other reasons, he said, in estimating the total dismissals.

His office will prosecute three drunken driving cases involving bad radars.

He said prosecutors would try to overcome the certification issue in court on those cases using other forms of reasonable suspicious to make traffic stops. Speed measured by detection devices is not the only reason police may stop a car for going too fast.

Moore, the elected prosecutor for the district that covers Buncombe County, said he could have tried the same strategy with the rest of the speeding tickets.

But, he said, he felt dismissing them was fair. And, fighting them in court would be time consuming, he said.

"My office is not going to spend the time it could take," he said. "We are already wasting more time than we should be."

The dismissals come at the end of two weeks of controversy for the Asheville Police Department and Anderson.

City managers on Wednesday sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor disputing a lieutenant's claim that he was reprimanded for taking leave to serve in the Army Reserves.

They told the federal agency that a memo from Chief William Anderson was never placed in Lt. Bill Wilke's official personnel file.

The agency sent the city a letter Oct. 3 saying it agreed that Wilke had been disciplined. It said the action was out of compliance with the federal law that allows employees time off to serve in the military.

The city says it never got the letter. The address on the letter was wrong though an email address for a city official was accurate.

The chief's memo, obtained by the Citizen-Times, indicates it was sent to Wilke's personnel file. Whether it stayed there, or was even put in his official file, is in dispute.

City officials did not answer questions on Thursday about the matter, including questions about whether APD maintains personnel files separate from those at City Hall.

The Department of Labor declined comment, saying it does not discuss individual cases.

The Aug. 11 memo from Anderson telling Wilke he had failed to follow proper leave procedure was not a disciplinary action, city managers said the letter they sent to the federal government on Wednesday.

The chief, in the memo, warns Wilke failing to follow the leave procedure again would be cause for discipline.

The city had asked for 30 days notice.

The city's disciplinary policy calls for written warnings but they must be provided to employes on a special form. It is unclear whether the memo from Anderson counted as an official warning. That question was among those city managers did not answer on Thursday.

Last week, 44 police officers signed a petition saying they had no confidence in departmental leaders citing forced overtime, low morale and administrative failures among their reasons.

The department is facing two calls for outside investigations.

Moore on Thursday said he had no plans to call in the State Bureau of Investigation. He said poor management is not evidence of a crime.

Moore said his office will send letters to people whose tickets will be dismissed within a week.

He said he's not sure how the refunding of fines will work. Fine money goes to the schools. Court costs go to the court system.

Getting the money back could be hard to do.

"We are looking to see how that would work and whether or not we have the ability to refund people's money," he said.

Even without a refund, a dismissal could mean a savings for drivers who had insurance rates increase after tickets.

Moore questioned whether the police department went back far enough in researching tickets. He said the department stopped its review in December 2013.

The newest ticket in the batch police provided was written on Sept. 28, he said.

Anderson said he learned about the problem with the radar guns on Oct. 3 in from WLOS.

His commanders knew about the lapsed certifications months ago.

Radar guns must be calibrated and certified annually.

Lt. Mark Byrd told his boss, and other lieutenants, about the problem Aug. 21 after he discovered the logistics department was working on getting the radars into compliance.

He suggested the department stop using the radar guns until they were certified.

Commanders did not follow his suggest. Police continued to write tickets using bad radar guns.

Anderson said no one notified him about the problem.

Someone in the department did take notice, though.

A document that appears to be an invoice list from the company that calibrates the department's devices shows 23 of them were calibrated on Sept. 9. Some had been expired for more than a year.

Anderson and Deputy Chief Wade Wood did not immediately respond to questions on Thursday.