Two Of Our Favorite Things — Black Cars And Trial Attorneys — Remind Us To Expect The Impossible

This all sounds perfectly reasonable:

[Black car advocate and Manhattan attorney Lauren Z.] Asher, who speaks at Lamborghini speed and wears her brown hair swept back in a banana clip, is thirty-three. Last year, her second in solo practice, she handled around three thousand taxi and black-car cases, making her, as the editor of Black Car News said recently, “one of the biggies” in the field. In September, she opened an office on Eighth Avenue, a block up from a Lukoil station and near a couple of taxi stands.

It was 8:30 A.M., and Asher was examining the summons of Olusegun Victor Samuel, a Nigerian cabbie who’d been issued a summons for running a stop sign at the corner of Spring and Washington. “It’s an unknown cop,” she said—meaning one unfamiliar to her, and thus, likely, with the clubby ways of the D.M.V. court — “which is great for me.” Suddenly, Asher ran down the hall, popping her head into a chamber designated Hearing Room 3. “I didn’t want the case to get pulled,” she explained.

A few minutes later, the trial commenced. Asher, the defendant (wearing a maroon puffy jacket), and the officer who wrote the ticket stood in front of the bench. The officer read aloud from his notes:

“I was on the northwest corner travelling eastbound, when I observed a Ford yellow taxi coming southbound down Washington Street. I observed the vehicle go through a marked stop sign approximately ten feet before the crosswalk and proceeded to pull the motorist over.”

Asher made a motion to dismiss.

“Granted.”

The officer apparently had not described the traffic signal in sufficient detail. “A stop sign’s an eight-sided red sign with the word ‘STOP’ on it, has to face oncoming traffic, has to be posted near the corner,” Asher said. “And he didn’t get any of that.”