A judge ruled in lawsuit over traffic camera tickets. Here’s what he decided
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Judge denied class-action status for Mississippi motorists suing Securix over tickets.
- Court said plaintiffs didn't show common questions of law/fact across states.
- Ocean Springs collected $468,681 in ticket revenue and hasn't spent it pending cases.
A federal judge has denied class-action status to Mississippi motorists who hoped thousands of others would be allowed to join them in a lawsuit that claims they were illegally ticketed for driving without insurance after traffic cameras captured their license plate numbers.
Several vehicle owners filed the lawsuit against Securix LLC, a company no longer operating its controversial ticketing program in Mississippi. Securix contracted with the city of Ocean Springs for the program in 2021, eventually expanding to the cities of Biloxi, Pearl and Senatobia.
The Georgia-based company used automatic license plate readers, usually mounted on traffic signals, to capture images of license plates. With the help of artificial intelligence, Securix extracted license plate numbers from the images. The pertinent law enforcement agency was supposed to run the plates through a statewide insured driver database to determine a violation before tickets were mailed out.
But the motorists suing Securix claim the company deceived them by essentially posing as a law enforcement agency through its mailed citations. The law firm representing them, Chhabra Gibbs & Herrington in Jackson, wanted to represent thousands of vehicle owners ticketed nationwide, saying the wrongs they suffered were common to all. The lawsuit said 6,000 motorists were ticketed over a two-month period in Ocean Springs alone.
Judge Sul Ozerden said the attorneys failed to identify the other states where Securix was operating and how laws against unjust enrichment and abuse of process in those states might differ from Mississippi laws. Questions of law or fact must be common for a class to be certified.
Where the lawsuit stands
The lawsuit also asks the judge to stop Securix’s behavior without being more specific about what behavior needs to be restrained. In addition, Ozerden said, the requested punitive damages could not be determined for the entire class because each person was not necessarily affected in the same way.
“For class members to recover punitive damages, they would be required to show individual proof that they were cited and fined by defendant, or had their license suspended,” he wrote.
The mailed citations offered vehicle owners the option of going to court to fight their tickets, or allowed them to enter a diversion program and pay a $300 fine. In Ocean Springs, Securix and the city shared fine revenue. Ozerden noted that one plaintiff in the case paid the full fine, while another paid $100 of the total and a third paid nothing.
Ozerden previously dismissed the vehicle owners’ claims of a federal due process violation by Securix. Now that he has denied class-action status for the case, Ozerden wants to hear from the motorists’ attorneys why the case should remain in federal court.
The city of Ocean Springs collected a total of $468,681 from the ticketing program, but has not spent the money. Instead, the city is awaiting an outcome in the court case. City attorney David Harris attended a telephone conference in the case in November, more than a month before Ozerden’s ruling on class-action status.
The father of David Harris, Chancery Judge Neil Harris, is presiding over a second lawsuit filed against Securix. Three politically prominent Mississippians and Securix teamed up to spread the program across the state, court records show.
The three Mississippians — Republican political operatives Quinton Dickerson and Josh Gregory of the Jackson area and former Ocean Springs city attorney Robert Wilkinson — are suing to dissolve the company they formed with Securix LLC. Their partnership with Jonathan Miller of Securix devolved into name-calling and accusations of wrongdoing, court records show.
A trial is scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. Monday in the case in Chancery Court at the Jackson County courthouse on Magnolia Street.
