They’re as predictable as sunrises.

Get a speeding ticket or any other traffic summons and you can count on getting solicitations in the mail a week or so later from an attorney offering to represent you.

While some people may like the idea of not having to hunt for a lawyer, state Sen. Nick Scutari (D-Union) says others consider it embarrassing and an invasion of their privacy. As a result, he’s trying to ban traffic summonses from being in the public domain.

“I’ve gotten a large amount of complaints about this, about it being an invasion of privacy,” said Scutari. “In New Jersey, it’s not hard to find a lawyer. What you see is a demeaning of the profession and an invasion of privacy.”

Scutari is a lawyer, but most of his practice is working as a municipal prosecutor. His clients are the police officers who issue the tickets.

Last week, Scutari introduced a bill (S-3056) that would exempt traffic summons records from public access under the state’s Open Public Records Act.

Because traffic summonses are public, attorneys looking to drum up business scour municipal court records regularly to find names and addresses of people accused of going too fast, running stop signs or other traffic violations.

Often within a matter of days of the alleged violation, the driver gets a letter in the mail from a lawyer – with a return address – offering his services.

“Maybe people don’t want others in their house to know their business,” Scutari said.

Darren Gelber, president of the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers of New Jersey, said lawyers understand how people can feel embarrassed or that their privacy has been invaded, but “those issues should be addressed in other ways other than making these records private.”

He said it would cut off a source of information defense attorneys often use in criminal trials to help their clients.

For instance, defense attorneys trying to discredit a witness who claims to have seen their client commit a crime can be discredited by a traffic summons that shows the so-called eyewitness was actually dealing with a motor vehicle stop at the time of the crime, Gelber said.

“We’re not insensitive to the issue, but we’re not sure this bill is the right way to go about it,” Gelber said. “It’s of concern to us that this avenue of information would be completely cut off.”

Steve Carrellas, New Jersey representative of the National Motorists Association, said he would support the bill, but as written now, it would prevent organizations like his from gathering information and statistics about traffic violations.

He said the red-light camera program has established precedent for keeping traffic summonses private because those tickets are not public.

“Depending on what the wording of the actual bill does, the wording may go further than the actual intent. And that we would have a problem with,” he said.

Scutari said he’s aware the bill won’t please many of his fellow attorneys.

“I’m sure the lawyers who do it (search the records) aren’t going to like it,” he said. “We’ll hear them out.”

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