Hutzell: Scanned by police, a Maryland driver gets vindication but no apology

Lanita Gosha didn’t expect an apology.

But she drove Tuesday from Baltimore to the District Court in Annapolis to make sure the traffic citations that consumed her life were settled, once and for all.

In November, an Anne Arundel County Police officer scanned her license plate while they were both stopped at a red light. He told her the automated check flagged her for having a suspended driver’s license.

Weeks later, after the Postal Service couldn’t deliver Gosha’s court summons for the citation, she missed her hearing and a judge ordered her arrest for being a no-show.

That random scan and court order cost her the background clearance she needs for her work as a media production assistant in Washington. It cost her a side job as an Uber and Lyft driver.

She worried for weeks that she’d be arrested if she stepped outside her apartment.

On Monday, prosecutors finally agreed that the scan results were wrong. The admission was just a tiny “x” in a tiny box on an electronic form — “Insufficient Evidence.”

It hardly seems sufficient.

“It’s like everybody else goes on with life,” said Gosha, sitting outside the courtroom. “You know, the police officer, he goes to work. The commissioner, they still have their job. The clerk’s office, they do their stuff. The judge — everybody goes on per usual.

“But me, I’m out of almost three weeks of work. I’m out of my part-time job, thousands in the hole.”

Police and prosecutors weren’t out to get Gosha. It’s the automated system that snagged her, and it just doesn’t care about innocence or guilt.

So when Officer Nicholas Novak’s scanner pinged her on Nov. 13, he turned on his emergency lights on Fort Smallwood Road. She wasn’t ready for the confusion that followed.

Gosha eased into the intersection to let Novak pass, thinking he was headed to an emergency.

“Then he pointed his finger at me.”

The officer walked up to her open window and said that a computer search flagged her license as suspended in Maryland. He told her to stay put and walked back to his car.

Gosha turned on her phone camera, capturing what happened when he returned.

“I’ve never seen a license suspended that long,” Novak said.

He explained that you can’t register a car with a suspended license, so both her license and registration were invalid. She could go to jail, he said, but he would let her park the car and find another way home.

“You’re getting tickets, so you must appear in court.”

He suggested going to the Motor Vehicle Administration to figure out the mistake, then presenting the results to a court commissioner.

“This is so fu---ing ghetto,” Gosha said, face in her hands.

The officer seemed sympathetic.

“I know, it’s ...” he said, leaving the thought unfinished.

County police have been using automated license plate readers in patrol cars and on elevated platforms since 2012. The department touts them as crime prevention and investigative tools.

The error rate nationwide is about 5%, according to a 2020 analysis by the Brennan Center, a justice system think tank.

The most common mistake happens when a database “hot list” is out of date.

That’s why Novak’s scanner spotted an 11-year-old license suspension in the District of Columbia. While pregnant, she got a ticket for running a stop sign, but she said she forgot about it after the baby was born.

She settled it years ago and never suspected it might be lurking somewhere online.

Gosha’s D.C. license was valid, but an inactive Maryland license she’d once held was also suspended in a reciprocal agreement between the two jurisdictions.

That suspension was still in the database.

She went to the MVA with proof that her license and registration were current, and took the results to a district court commissioner in Glen Burnie.

Then her court summons bounced back as undeliverable.

The car dealer who sold her a 2024 Acura Integra registered it to an old address. She said she gave Novak her new Baltimore address, but the citation didn’t include her apartment number.

Gosha missed the Feb. 2 hearing, and a district court judge issued an arrest warrant.

Even when a public defender got involved to help clear up the confusion, prosecutors had doubts.

The state’s attorney’s office opposed lifting the warrant because Gosha had multiple addresses.

“And because at the time the motion was filed, we had no DC record to show she was valid and the DC ticket was paid,” wrote William Cockey, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, in an email.

The MVA requires you to change your license within 60 days of moving to Maryland. Gosha said she’s waiting until she sells her house in Washington.

For Gosha, the scan of her tags started a trip through the upside-down world of traffic court, where technology such as license plate readers and databases shift the burden of proof to the driver.

She still doesn’t understand why Novak scanned her license plate. Was it because of the way she looks, she wondered, a slim Black woman with close-cropped blond hair?

“I’m sorry, I feel like I got pulled over for driving while Black,” Gosha said. “That’s a real possibility.”

Police would only say Novak stopped her because the scan pinged a suspended license notice in the database.

And the scan is just what the name describes — automated.

The public defender told Gosha she didn’t have to be in Annapolis at 8:45 a.m. for the official end of the matter. She just wanted some resolution. With no prosecutor in the courtroom by 9:45, though, she decided to head home.

Now she’ll work on getting her record expunged, her security clearance restored and her driving job back.

“I would love an apology, but am I going to get that? Absolutely not,” Gosha said. “Sometimes you’ve got to forgive somebody who is not sorry and accept the apology that was never given.

“And this is clearly one of those situations.”