Details Of The New "Paul Miller's Law"

Paul Miller’s Law went into effect in Pennsylvania in early June and it relates to cell phone use in cars.

The big takeaway is you can’t use any handheld devices in your car – period.

Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Megan Frazer explained, “If you can hit one button and answer phone calls, so it’s on Bluetooth, or hit go on GPS, that is all you can do on a handheld device. That’s including cell phones, tablets, anything that you can hold in your hand, you can not have it in your hand and be scrolling or typing away, it’s one button and that is it.”

Careless driving covers a lot of situations.

Frazer said, “It depends on how you’re driving. If you hurt somebody, if you cause a crash, if you’re swerving all over the roadway, regardless, if you’re doing something in your vehicle besides driving, and you could potentially hurt somebody, you’re going to be getting a citation.”

Use of a cell phone in the vehicle is considered a primary offense.

Frazer explained, “Before it was a primary offense only for commercial drivers, like the big 18 wheel drivers, but now this is a primary fence, meaning that we can pull you over, if a police officer or a trooper sees you in your vehicle on your phone, we can pull you over for that, and that alone. A secondary offense in Pennsylvania would be something like the seat belt law, for example. But normally with the seat belt law, you’re probably doing something else, and we’ll just see you’re not wearing it, and we can maybe tack that on, but we can’t pull you over just for seat belts.”

What were the numbers since the law began?

Frazer said, “Statewide, so just the texting law for Paul Miller’s Law alone was 694 citations across the state, and there’s 308 warnings. So, that was from June 8 through June 10, so that was three days, and almost 700 citations were issued across the state. Across the state for the other citations, there were 6,013 other citations and 98 DUIs in the span of three days for the extra enforcement for the Paul Miller’s Law.”