Laws for Obscured Traffic Signs

My question involves a traffic ticket from the state of: CA

I've got photos of a totally obscured NO LEFT TURN sign, for which I was cited.

I decided to see if I could ferret out any CA decisions involving citations when obscured signs were involved, and I can't find any. I can find a Supreme Court decision involving jaywalking, but not something like this. I would think the common sense injustice of being cited failing to obey a totally obscured sign would have gotten someone pissed off enough to carry it to the Supreme Court.

Really? Am I missing something? NO CASE LAW at all?

You'll find cases involving personal injury, but they won't be very useful.

Traffic court matters, in the greater scheme of things, are trivial. Appeals are expensive. There are thus few appeals to the appellate courts from traffic court, and fewer published opinions from those appeals.

If the sign is in fact totally obscured, that is something you would expect a court would recognize and take into consideration at a hearing on the ticket, not something that should require multiple appeals.

In California, the first appeal in the local Appellate Division is free. However, after that, as Mr. K says, it does get expensive.

While ignorance of the law is no excuse, generally, the defendant must have an intent to violate the law to be convicted. Obviously, you know not to make a U-turn when a sign prohibits it. However, if the sign is obscured, you could argue that there was no intent to violate the law and your "ignorance" may be directly attributable to the failure of some agency to maintain and/or install a sign appropriately.

Quote:

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Quoting Mr. Knowitall

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You'll find cases involving personal injury, but they won't be very useful.

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Yes, I found several interesting ones. Apparently the municipality has liability if they failed to maintain a sign that "created a dangerous condition" and "injury" was sustained (Each as defined by statute). I was trying to design a legal argument that drew from this notion, but found no legal doctrine to permit the crossover.

One reason you may not have seen appeals on this issue is that appeals are not a chance to get someone else to look at the same set of facts and reach a new conclusion or a chance to introduce more evidence. For example, if a judge makes errors in law or reaches a conclusion that based on the evidence presented no reasonable person could reach, then you have something.

If a judge looked at pictures of a sign that had a tree partially obscuring it but still entered a conviction, an appeals court would not overturn, unless, perhaps no driver could have seen it at any point approaching the intersection or while stopped at the intersection. In other words, the Trial Court has significant latitude in judging evidence and in assigning weight to that evidence.