Despite its approximately 3,000 traffic accident fatalities per year, California is one of the nation’s safest states to drive in. Due to an increase in distracted driving deaths, however, California has enacted legislation penalizing the use of electronic devices and other forms of distracting behavior while driving. The legal risks involve more than a simple traffic citation – you could be disadvantaged in a civil lawsuit, or under certain circumstances even charged with a criminal offense.
Distracted Driving Restrictions
All drivers on California roads are prohibited from distracting activities involving hand-held electronic devices including texting (writing, sending or reading) and talking on the phone. On-duty school bus drivers and drivers under 18 may not even use hands-free cell phones while driving. For drivers under 18, the hands-free ban is a secondary offense – the officer must witness you committing another offense before he can cite you for using a hands-free cell phone. No such restriction applies to school bus drivers.
Penalties
California imposes a $20 fine on drivers cited for first-offense distracted driving, and a fine of $50 for second and subsequent offenses. Court costs are $56 and $140 for first and second offenses, respectively.
In the Event of an Accident
In the event of an accident, evidence that you were violating the distracted driving law can harm you far more than a citation can, because it can subject you to civil liability. As a defendant in a lawsuit, a court can find you automatically “negligent per se” if the plaintiff can prove that you violated the distracted driving law and that your violation was a “substantial factor” in causing the accident. This means that you can face civil liability even if the accident was partly someone else’s fault. You can defend against an allegation of negligence per se by proving that your behavior was reasonable under the circumstances.
California resolves civil lawsuits using a “pure comparative negligence” standard. This means that if you are a plaintiff in a car accident lawsuit and you were partly at fault for the accident (due to distracted driving, for example), the amount of damages you will receive will be reduced in proportion to your fault – if you were 20 percent at fault, for example, you will have to settle for 80 percent of your damages. Even if you were 99 percent at fault, however, you can still receive one percent of your damages.
Criminal Penalties
In most cases, the greatest danger you face upon violation of the distracted driving statute is having to pay damages in a lawsuit. In extreme cases, however, you could face criminal charges and even imprisonment. The legal standard for a criminal prosecution under the distracted driving statute is “criminal negligence”. You commit criminal negligence when you act with “conscious disregard for known or obvious risks to human life and safety”. If you take your eyes off the road for 10 seconds to write a text message, for example, and a fatal accident results, you might be charged with homicide.
– Updated through September 1, 2016