BELLOWS FALLS, Vt. - It was on a January day in 2005 when Myra Lawlor had to stop doing her job so Bellows Falls Police Officer Michael Chesanek could do his.
Lawlor, a rural mail carrier for the Bellows Falls Post Office, was delivering mail to the customers on her route just as she had done every day since she started the job 19 years prior - she would drive her own car to the mailbox by the road, lower the right side window and drop off whatever envelopes and parcels she had for the address.
The only problem was that she was shifted to the right and was not behind the steering wheel. That, Chesanek told her, is a violation of state law.
After warning her once before, Chesanek said he couldn't let it go the second time.
"I didn't want to make too much of an issue out of it, but safety needs to be addressed," Chesanek said on Friday.
A year later, the $194 ticket Chesanek gave Lawlor has since built a mountain out of what seemed to be a molehill, with implications for Vermont law and the way rural mail carriers across the state do their job. The case could end up in the state Supreme Court.
The sticking point is a little known statute that went into effect in 1973 requiring anyone operating a vehicle to sit behind the steering wheel at all times, no exceptions. Vermont appears to be the only state in the nation with such a law, according to the U.S. Attorney's office in Vermont.
Rural mail carriers in Vermont don't have to wear seat belts. In fact, they are at the top of the list of exemptions for the state's seat belt law. But the steering wheel statute says no one is exempted unless it's an emergency.
The U.S. Attorney's office said an exemption is implied through 30 years of precedent (no mail carrier seems to have been ticketed for this before) and through the statute that excuses mail carriers from wearing seat belts. The Legislature just overlooked a minor detail when they passed the steering wheel statute into law.
Bellows Falls Police said that is not their problem.
"You can't take a leap from one statute to another," Bellows Falls Police Chief Keith Clark said. "(If police did that), it says we treat different people in different ways."
Michael Drescher, the U.S. attorney handling the case for the Postal Service, declined to comment for this article because the court's decision is still pending. But in an 11-page filing in which he asked for the ticket to be dismissed, Drescher said the police department's reading of the law would have "absurd" consequences for mail carriers by creating unnecessary hardships that would nearly double the time it takes to do their job.
"A close analysis of the Vermont traffic statutes shows that the Vermont Legislature could not have intended for the Steering Wheel Statute to apply to rural mail carriers while delivering the mail," Drescher said. "Such a construction would (a) lead to several absurd results and defy common sense, (b) render sections of the Vermont Code meaningless, and (c) contravene several well-established rules of statutory construction."
Finally, Lawlor has several state and local police officers on her route, none of whom ever questioned the way she delivered mail. After 19 years without being stopped (17 years on her current route), Drescher said that should be considered a precedent.
Everybody knows that rural mail carriers who use their own car deliver mail this way, Drescher said. In his filing, he calls it the "rural way."
Chauncey Liese of the Commissioner's Office at the Department of Motor Vehicles said he was unaware of the case but, on the face of it, he would have to side with the police. The steering wheel statute doesn't let anyone off the hook, he said.
"I would say no, she would not be exempt," Liese said.
If the court agrees with Liese, then the U.S. Postal Service could suffer some major expense outfitting all 350 rural mail carriers in the state with right-side driving vehicles. But that won't happen anytime soon. Both sides are expected to appeal if they lose and Clark expects to fight it to the Supreme Court.
"I can't let this go," Lawlor said in a phone interview on Thursday. "It's not only going to affect me, it is going to affect the other mail carriers (in Vermont). If they ticket me here, they will ticket anywhere else in the state."
It is nothing personal between the police and Lawlor, Chesanek said, nor does he have any grudge against the U.S. Postal Service. He is just doing his job enforcing the law.
"Somebody has got to do something," Chesanek said. "Either the post office needs to provide the drivers right side vehicles or the state has got to change the laws. But the way the law is written, I've got to enforce it."