Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2318 into law on April, making the use of a cell phone for calling or texting while driving illegal in the state.
While Arizona has discussed such a bill for more than a decade, the death of Salt River Police Department Officer Clayton Townsend in January, right at the start of the legislative session, fired up some lawmakers and put pressure on others, adding to the momentum of passing a bill this term.
Numerous communities around the state had a some law on the books, including Sedona and, recently, Cottonwood, joined by Coconino, Yavapai and Pima counties, Bisbee, Clifton, Chino Valley, Flagstaff, Kingman, Oro Valley, Prescott, San Luis, Sedona, Tucson, Yuma, El Mirage, Fountain Hills, Glendale, Phoenix, Surprise and Tempe.
Some prohibited only texting and driving, while other banned any handheld-cellphone use while driving. The piecemeal nature of the bans meant that drivers were likely uncertain about what laws applied in various parts of the state. HB 2318 overrides all those municipal laws, making them uniform across the state.
While such a bill was first proposed in 2007, Senate President Andy Biggs [R-District 22, then District 12] has repeatedly killed the bill in committee or on the house floor. Biggs left the Arizona State Senate in 2016 after winning a seat in Congressional District 5.
In January, Sen. Karen Fann [R-District 1] was elected president of the Senate. Fann had already passed a bill in a previous legislative term that banned cell phone use by teens driving on a learner’s permit and during the first six months after getting a provisional license, so banning cell phone use by adults was merely a matter of time.
Due to an emergency measure written into HB 2318, the law took effect immediately; however, police will only be able to issue warnings until Friday, Jan. 1, 2021. Only after that date drivers can be ticketed.
The bill excludes certain activities, such as using a CB radio, operating a GPS or dashboard equipment built into the vehicle, making calls to report criminal activity on the road or calling 911 or a professional driver using a two-way radio required by their job, like a police officer or utility worker.
A week after signing HB 2318 into law, Ducey vetoed a similar proposal, Senate Bill 1141, which would have outlawed “distracted driving,” a far more general law beyond merely cell phones.
SB 1141 would require a police officer to witness the distracted driving “that is not related to the actual operation of the motor vehicle in a manner that interferes with the safe operation of the motor vehicle” and that the driver “operates a motor vehicle in a manner that is an immediate hazard to another person, a motor vehicle or property or the person does not exercise reasonable control of a motor vehicle under the circumstances.”
According the Ducey, he vetoed the bill to avoid confusing drivers about what was and was not legal.
Under SB 1141, a driver using a cell phone but with one hand on the wheel and fixated on the road while maintaining a consistent speed and staying fully in their lane could argue they were not distracted and thus not violating the law, but could still be cited under HB 2318.
The extensive HB 2318 is also narrowly tailored to address a physical object in a driver’s hand while the shorter and briefer SB 1141 is a highly subjective law that would be hard to prove in court. Would eating a burger behind the wheel be distracting? Depends on the driver.
If the driver is cited for distracted driving at an accident scene, certainly, but if a driver is simply stopped in traffic for being “distracted,” they could argue before a judge that they were not and were instead focused on the road, even if they were multitasking and doing something else with one of their hands. Judges would have the unenviable task of determining whether police officer or driver is in the right solely based on their gut, which is no way to adjudicate the law.
If legislators want to pass a distracted driving law in the future, it needs to be carefully crafted and extensively worded like HB 2318 so that, if police pull over allegedly distracted drivers, there is no ambiguity about what the law states.
— Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
