By Randy Grider
Editor
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Allen Robinson may have won the latest battle, but the war is not over.
The Parkesburg, Pa., truck driver scored a victory in July when a federal judge ruled three Pennsylvania state troopers violated his First Amendment rights by arresting him while he was videotaping truck safety inspections.
U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III awarded Robinson $41,000 in the case. His ruling stated that the three troopers, Patrick V. Fetterman, John Rigney and Gregg Riek, violated Robinson’s rights to free speech and unreasonable seizure of his videotaping equipment.
Now Robinson hopes he can make changes in the way enforcement officers conduct roadside truck inspections.
“The fight is not over,” he says. “I want to make some changes in how roadside inspections are handled, specifically in regards to signage, requiring florescent clothing being worn by enforcement officers and having inspections required to be at least 100 feet off the roadway.”
Robinson’s story, which we chronicled in the November 2004 issue of Truckers News began in 2000 when he came upon a truck safety inspection as he was traveling in his personal vehicle along a stretch of rural Route 41 near his home. He said the area chosen for the inspection was at the top of a hill where the road merges from a three-lane back into a two-lane. No signage of an inspection in progress, numerous tractor-trailers pulled over on the shoulder of the road and bottlenecking traffic almost led to him being involved in an accident.
