[litoE]

Florida must be using cheap cameras. My daughter got a red light ticket in Beverly Hills a couple of years ago. They mailed the ticket to her as the registered owner of the car, including the photographs from the cameras which showed that a) she entered the intersection on a red light, b) her car front and back showing the license plates and c) the face of the driver, establishing it was her. From her expression on the photograph you could tell she was saying "oh, shit!" She just paid it.

[seemaze]

Same here; tickets always include the photo of the driver. If the photo is unclear or differs from the registered owner, tickets are easily dismissed.

However, I agree with Florida on this; the onus should be not be on the accused to prove innocence after a citation is issued. Feels like a 'call us to unsubscribe' time-wasting dark pattern.

[hunter2_]

If the law is such that the owner is guilty regardless of who was driving, but the owner can opt to reassign the fine to the driver if they have the willingness and the evidence to do so, then proving innocence isn't really what's happening if the driver opts to do it.

That said, if merely being the owner of a tool is sufficient to be guilty of whatever infraction someone else performs with said tool, that has 2 problems beyond the whole "proving your innocence" debate:

1. Why stop climbing up the chain at the current owner when you could keep climbing and say it's all the fault of the manufacturer? I jest, but this illustrates why, despite my first paragraph, it's indeed only sensible that the driver be at fault, so the government must prove who was driving.

2. Why treat cars differently from, say, weapons?

[seemaze]

The whole point is that the law is not such that "owner is guilty regardless". This is the weaponization of bureaucracy to maximize profit. The cost to issue a legally dubious citation is substantially less than the cost to refute it. It also happens to fall afoul of the right to due process, as realized by the state of Florida.