TRI In The News
Drivers Threatened with $250 Fine for Sleeping in Car
If you’re driving through Virginia, you don’t dare think about catching a few winks in your car if you get tired. That’s the warning from the civil rights experts at the Rutherford Institute, who say a new Roanoke County ordinance allows police to do warrantless searches and seizures on vehicles and their drivers. If they’re taking a nap. The Roanoke County Code 13-14 “makes it illegal for people to sleep in their cars and subjects them to warrantless seizures and searches by police and a fine of $250,” Rutherford President John Whitehead explains. He is asking officials, in a letter, to repeal the new law. Whitehead calls the plan a “thinly veiled attempt to crack down on the area’s homeless population that is “constitutionally vague” and “overly broad.”
