In
this article about the case, there's a link to a pdf file for the decision by the judge. In it, there's this passage:
"In short, not only did the prosecution fail to make it's case that the defendant - who they admitted was wearing headgear bearing a certification of compliance - had violated the helmet law as it was written and/or interpreted by the California Courts, but the defendant did prove to this court's satisfaction that issuance of eight citations for wearing a headgear bearing a certifcation of compliance with federal standards, violated the injunction issued by the Federal court in
Easyriders, thereby violating the defendant's 4th amendment rights as described in
Easyriders.
For the Easyriders case,
click here.
IMO it was a violation of due process. If you read just after the passage I posted, there's a reference to the vagueness of the law. In California, the way the law was written it was up to the subjective opinion of the CHP(California Highway Patrol) officer whether the defendant knowingly had on a helmet that violated the statute. And since there's no list to be found of which helmets are compliant, it allows the CHP officer to give people tickets to whoever he wants without any basis of fact to go on. And since there's no list, how can a defendant know which helmets are actually compliant since DOT stickers are easy to buy and stick on any kind of headgear. Therefore, a person can't really "knowingly" violate the law if he has some kind of headgear on with a compliant(DOT) sticker on it.
Or at least I think that's what this ruling means.
edited to add: By the way, there's no US agency that actually tests helmets for compliance. AFAIK it's just up to the helmet manufacturers to test them and find them in compliance with the DOT(Department of Transportation) before slapping that DOT sticker on them.
