[via the Portland Mercury Blog]
Portland lawyer Mark Ginsberg has filed an appeal in the Ayla Holland fixed-gear case.
Ginsberg waited to make his decision until after he and his staff could closely scrutinize the transcript from the initial trial.
Ayla Holland told me in a recent phone conversation that she feels strongly about taking this case to a higher court:
“This is important to me on principal. I feel like the officer involved is enforcing his opinion rather than the law.”
Holland also said that there are ten other cyclists who have received the same ticket in the last month since her trial and they all plan to plead “not guilty”.
This is turning into quite a little mess. Do we really want our police resources spent and our courts clogged with these cases? Isn’t there a better, more cooperative way to deal with this?
The cycling community has worked with Police on many contentious issues like Critical Mass, bike theft, crash investigations, and so on. It’s just too bad that in this situation we can’t sit down and work toward solving this problem in a more productive way that respects the concerns of both sides.