West Virginia's governor signed a bill this week increasing penalties for drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses and allowing the use of a license plate number to charge a vehicle's owner in cases where the driver's actual identity can't be determined.
Senate Bill 13, which passed the Legislature with nearly unanimous support before Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin signed it, comes after much recent attention to illegal bus passing.
In spring 2015, as part of a regular report to the state Department of Education, Kanawha County recorded 90 illegal passes on a single day tested, and the local school system's transportation department sought to bring attention to the problem.
The bill states that if the driver's identity isn't clear but the license plate number of the offending vehicle is known, "it may be inferred that the operator was an owner or lessee of the motor vehicle for purposes of the probable cause determination." And where the vehicle has more than one registered owner or renter, police can charge the owner or renter first listed on the vehicle's registration.
Brette Fraley, head of transportation for the Kanawha school system, thanked lawmakers for passing the bill and the governor for signing it. He said it's tough for the cameras on Kanawha school buses to catch drivers' faces to determine their actual identity.
"But we catch the license plate consistently," Fraley said.
The bill increases from $150 to $250 the minimum fine for the first offense of passing a stopped school bus that has flashing lights. The maximum first-offense fine will remain the same, at $500, as does the alternative or additional punishment of no more than six months in jail.
For the second offense, the fine of $500 is changed to a fine of not less than $500 nor more than $1,000, while the alternative or additional punishment of no more than six months in jail remains the same.
For the third and subsequent offenses, the existing mandatory fine of $500 is doubled, and the additional minimum mandatory jail time is increased from 24 hours to 48 hours, while the maximum jail time stays at six months.
In the section concerning charging vehicle owners and renters using license plate numbers, the bill states that owners and renters can face only fines, not jail time, if the only evidence against them is "the presence of the vehicle at the scene at the time of the offense."
Also, police can't use just a license plate number to charge the owner or renter of a vehicle with felonies for a bus pass that causes serious bodily injury or death to a victim.
The serious-bodily-injury felony carries one to three years in prison and a $500 to $2,000 fine, and the death felony carries one to 10 years in prison and a $1,000 to $3,000 fine.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Trump, R-Morgan, a co-sponsor of the bill, said he thinks courts would overturn the law if it allowed vehicle owners to be charged with felonies based only on license plate numbers.
He said that would effectively be changing a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt because the owner would be presumed to have been driving the vehicle during the crime.
"It's insufficient proof," he said. "If you're going to lock somebody up in the penitentiary, then you've got to have something more than a license plate number with no real additional evidence of who was operating the motor vehicle."
Kanawha Prosecuting Attorney Chuck Miller said the bill should increase the number of prosecutions for bus passing.
He compared the license plate provision to existing law allowing a vehicle's owner to be ticketed because the vehicle is parked in a no-parking zone.
"You can say I didn't park it there," Miller said. "But that's not going to relieve you of the responsibility to pay the fine."
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.