Speeding Ticket Taser

This September 14, 2006, Utah incident calls up several legal issues which, as we see, are painfully relevant to motorists.

The Utah Highway Patrol has reportedly said, "We found that Trooper Gardner's actions were lawful and reasonable under the circumstances."

My understanding is that it is a motorist's signed promise to appear in court (or pay the fine) that forms the legal basis on which the trooper releases the motorist from custody once he has issued a ticket. Most motorists who get a ticket do not even think of themselves as having been arrested to begin with, so they don't understand that a refusal to sign the promise to appear means that they can be taken to jail.

The trooper here perhaps takes it for granted that the motorist knows he can be arrested for refusing to sign, and perhaps takes it for granted that the motorist knows he is being arrested when the trooper tells him to get out of the car. Or maybe the trooper doesn't take these things for granted. Maybe he just doesn't care what the motorist knows.

The Utah Highway Patrol apparently believes that it was "reasonable" for the officer to fail to explicitly inform the motorist that he would be arrested if he refused to sign, and that it was reasonable, when arresting the motorist, to fail to explicitly inform the motorist that he was, in fact, being arrested.

The Utah Highway Patrol also apparently sees the motorist's actions here as either constituting a threat to the officer that reasonably warranted his use of the Taser in self-defense, or as making a Taser necessary to effect the arrest as a reasonable alternative to effecting the arrest by simply telling the motorist he was under arrest.

What do you think?