By Ben Joravsky
At about five o’clock they got nailed by a trooper somewhere north of Kenosha in Racine County. “I admit I was speeding,” says Keniry. “It had been crowded on the highway, and when we got off on a smaller road I busted loose a bit with the freedom of breaking off from the pack. As soon as I saw the cop on the side of the road, I thought, ‘God, am I stupid!’”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The trooper had clocked Keniry at 78 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone; he issued a ticket for $290.75 and gave Keniry a painful choice. “He said, ‘What’s it gonna be–cash, credit card, or your body?’ I figured there was no sense in fighting. I had been speeding and I didn’t want to go to jail. I was hoping that the other guys might come up with some cash to, you know, help me out. But they just sat there, and in that slight delay while I waited for them to help out before I brought out my credit card, the trooper looked in the back and saw a white plastic bucket covered by a T-shirt. He said, ‘What’s that?’ Joel said, ‘It’s a T-shirt.’ And the trooper said, ‘What’s under the T-shirt? Please move the shirt.’ And Joel did, and that’s when the trooper saw the empty beer bottles in the bucket.”
Back on the road, all conversation turned to the incident with the trooper. “Shannon was saying how lucky we were that he didn’t bust us for the open bottles and I was saying how stupid I was for letting them drink in my car. And someone said he probably didn’t bust us ’cause he needed to get his quota of speeding tickets rather than wasting his time hauling us in to the station. And we wondered if he came after us ’cause I was driving a BMW540i, which is a really nice car. But Shannon said nah, they probably didn’t notice the car, ’cause if they did notice the car they wouldn’t mess with me, figuring that I was some sort of big shot with lots of lawyers. Then we started talking about the trooper’s warning and one of us said jokingly, ‘Man, there’s probably not 50 cops in this whole county.’”
Keniry was charged with driving 47 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone and fined $172.10. “I just whipped out my credit card one more time. I was livid, but what could I do? I don’t think I had done anything wrong. They say it’s a 25-mile-an-hour speed limit, but the speed limit wasn’t posted. I wasn’t driving too fast for conditions. You wouldn’t want me to brake fast anyway because that would have caused a rear-ender with the car behind me. I was just biting my tongue ’cause I didn’t want to say anything that would get me in trouble. I remember there was this older guy watching and he was eating ice cream out of a Dixie cup and he had a big smirk on his face. I just wanted to tell him off but I kept my mouth shut.
“You get the argument from officials that they’re just trying to prevent speeding, but this goes beyond that definition,” says Kingstad. “This was a cattle call. This was assembly-line justice. This was kind of scary. It’s almost as though they’re saying, ‘Let’s get everyone with Illinois plates and haul them off to jail or make them pay the 200 bucks.’”
