A Canadian court has convicted a man of using his mobile phone while driving – even though the device was dead and stowed away in his vehicle’s glove compartment.

Patrick Henry Grzelak was driving home from work in October 2018, when he was pulled over by police in Surrey, British Columbia. Officers saw he was wearing earbud headphones and ticketed him for the use of a phone while driving.

Grzelak chose to contest the ticket.

Court documents appeared to side with Grzelak: “The cellphone battery was dead. The screen was not illuminated, no music, no conversation or anything else was coming through the earbuds.”

But the judge hearing the case found Grzelak guilty all the same.

In a decision which reads more like a philosophical treatise than a traffic court judgment, Justice Brent Adair examined what it means to “use” a phone under the law.

“The cellphone itself … was not in the defendant’s hands, or in his lap,” wrote Adair. “But that is not the end of the matter.”

Adair reasoned that by “plugging the earbud wire into the iPhone, the defendant had enlarged the device” meaning that the iPhone wasn’t just the handheld device, but also – by extension – the attached headphones.

Likening the action of plugging headphones into a phone to connecting a keyboard to a computer, Adair determined the keyboard “would then be part of the electronic device”.

Because the earbuds “were part of the electronic device and since the earbuds were in the defendant’s ears”, Adair concluded that “the defendant was holding the device (or part of the device) in a position in which it could be used, ie his ears.”

Adair also rejected the idea that a dead battery was a necessary factor, pointing to previous case law in 2015, which determined that holding a phone still constitutes use of the device, even if it has no power.

Grzelak was found in violation of the Motor Vehicle Act – which incurs a fine of C$368 (US$276) and four points in British Columbia. Fines can increase to $2,000 for repeat offenders – among the stiffest in the country.