Mary Pat Christie, wife of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, has been caught driving while using her cellphone and fined $250.
Mrs. Christie knew she was guilty—and to her credit, didn’t try to use her position to escape the consequences.
Officer Timothy Richard issued the Mrs. Christie a $250 ticket for distracted driving.
This was probably the biggest fish Richards had caught to date; he had only been on the force for three months.
Dash cam footage reveals that the first lady never identified herself as the governor’s wife. The officer never made the connection between the names.
The video does show that Mrs. Christie asked the officer why she was pulled over and telling him that she wasn’t making a call at the time.
“You can’t have it in your hand at all. No, ma’am,” the officer can be heard replying.
Mrs. Christie then asked, “What if you’ve, like, coffee in your hand?”
“Technically, according to the law, if it’s distracting, you can’t have a coffee in your hand or anything else, either. But it’s cellphone-distracted driver month,” the officer explained.
The first lady did not contest the ticket. She appeared in Warren Township municipal court just as any other citizen would, pleaded guilty to the charge of operating a motor vehicle while using a cell phone and paid her fine.
Combating Distracted Driving Deaths
Mrs. Christie was caught in a statewide crackdown aimed at lowering distracted driving incidents in New Jersey.
State Attorney General Christopher Porrino, seeing an 8 percent rise in traffic fatalities in 2016, sought and received $1.2 million in federal funds from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and used the money to fund enforcement of the “no cell phones in hands while driving” law.
The campaign involved 190 police agencies across the state cooperating to increase enforcement for a three-week period starting April 1, 2017.
Officer Timothy Richard was assigned to the detail on April 10. He made the stop in question at about 11 p.m. that night.
‘I’m a Sitting Assemblywoman’
While Mrs. Christie’s behavior might seem to be exactly what one would expect from any decent citizen, it shows a depth of character not always displayed by other New Jersey lawmakers in similar situations.
On April 28, 2017, New Jersey Assemblywoman Maria Rodriguez-Gregg, a Republican, was involved in a collision—she was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.
When police officers said they thought they smelled marijuana around her car, she became irate and demanded, “Are you serious? I am a sitting assemblywoman. Do you really think that I am smoking marijuana at this time of night? I’m calling my lawyer.”
“You see someone that rear-ended me and you see me that’s upset because I got rear-ended, and now you’re trying to put it on me,” she complained.
“I have done nothing but support the police,” she said later. “I have been one of your number one supporters politically.”
Though the accident was not her fault, Mrs. Rodriguez-Gregg was later arrested after she got out of her car and began yelling at police officers. A blood test showed no marijuana but some alcohol, and Mrs. Rodriguez-Gregg was charged with Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) and reckless driving.
In 2012 New Jersey Assemblyman Nelson Albano, a Democrat, tried to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the state trooper who stopped that as a legislator he had always been supportive of law enforcement and had been honored last year as legislator of the year by the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association.
Six days after the stop, Albano wrote to State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes seeking an investigation into the trooper, State Police Trooper Randy Pangborn, claiming the ticket might have been payback for a recent vote which raised health care costs for state employees.
In an internal complaint filed in response to that letter, Trooper Pangborn said officials from the State Troopers Fraternal Association pressured him to cancel the ticket.
Albano later publicly apologized.
