text: FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Drivers in California can legally read a map on their hand-held cellphones while behind the wheel, a state appeals court ruled Thursday. 
   
   The 5th District Court of Appeal reversed the case of a Fresno man who was ticketed in January 2012 for looking at a map on his iPhone 4 while stuck in traffic. The driver, Steven Spriggs, challenged the $165 fine. 
   
   But Spriggs said he's no champion of those who think they can get away with cruising down the road while staring at their phone or engaging in other such dangerous behavior. Spriggs would like the law that ensnared him to be rewritten so officers can do their job unencumbered. 
   
   "We're distracted all the time," he said. "If our distractions cause us to drive erratically, we should be arrested for driving erratically." 
   
   It's personal for Spriggs, whose son suffered a broken leg from a driver who was chatting on a cellphone. Spriggs said he uses a hands-free device to talk and drive. 
   
   The incident that ensnared Spriggs happened when he was stopped by roadwork. He had grabbed his cellphone to find an alternate route when a California Highway Patrol officer on a motorcycle spotted him and wrote the ticket. 
   
   Spriggs first challenged the case in traffic court, where he lost, and then appealed it himself to a three-judge panel in Fresno County Superior Court, where he lost a second time. 
   
   Determined that the law didn't apply to him, Spriggs took it to the appellate court, but this time with help of a law firm that stepped in to represent him pro bono. 
   
   In their 18-page ruling, the appellate judges said California's law that prohibits people from talking on their cellphones without a hands-free device could have been written more clearly, but it doesn't apply to looking at maps on cellphones. The law the CHP officer used to ticket Spriggs applies specifically to people "listening and talking" on cellphones, not using their mobile phone in other ways, the court said. 
   
   Texting while driving remains illegal under another California law passed after the one at issue in Spriggs' case. 
   
   Attorney Scott Reddie, who represented Spriggs, said it's now up to the state attorney general's office to decide if it will challenge Thursday's ruling to the California Supreme Court, which is choosy about which cases it hears. Nicholas Pacilio, a spokesman for Attorney General Kamala Harris, said the office is reviewing the ruling. 
   
   Neither Reddie nor Pacilio were familiar with other states that prohibit drivers from looking at cellphone map applications. 
   
   Spriggs, who is entitled to recoup his $165 fine, said the Superior Court judges who had upheld his violation were guilty of overreaching by applying the spotty law to him. He hopes that California legislators will now revisit the issue and fix it. 
   
   "They're going to have to do something," he said. "I just hope they take a look at the big picture." ||||| It's illegal in California to talk or text on a handheld cell phone while driving. But it's OK to pick up your phone and look at a map to see where you're going and how to get there. 
   
   That was the message Thursday from a state appeals court in Fresno, which threw out a driver's traffic ticket and $165 fine for using a map app in a traffic jam. 
   
   In a 2006 state law, the Legislature responded to concerns about distracted driving "by prohibiting drivers from engaging in conversations while holding the telephone in one's hand rather than prohibiting all hand-held uses of the telephone," said the Fifth District Court of Appeal. 
   
   The ruling is the first appellate interpretation of a 2006 state law that restricts handheld uses of a mobile telephone while driving. The ruling will have statewide impact if it withstands further appeals. 
   
   The driver, Steven Spriggs of Fresno, was stuck in freeway traffic on Highway 41 in January 2012 and pulled out his iPhone for a map to find another route. A Highway Patrol officer saw him holding the phone and pulled him over. 
   
   Spriggs challenged his ticket, but lower courts agreed with prosecutors that the law forbids all use of handheld phones. On Thursday, the appeals court said that's an unreasonable interpretation of the statute's language and history. 
   
   Because the law specifies that a phone should be used in a way that "allows hands-free listening and talking," its evident target was hands-on conversations and not other uses, said Justice Herbert Levy in the 3-0 ruling. Otherwise, he said, it might be illegal to hold the phone in your hand to check the time "or even to move it for use as a paperweight." 
   
   He quoted then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said in a press release after signing the bill in 2006 that "it's dangerous to talk on your cell phone while driving." 
   
   Levy also noted that the Legislature later passed a law that prohibits using a cell phone to send or receive a text message while driving, unless the phone is entirely voice-activated. That law would have been unnecessary, he said, if the 2006 statute already prohibited all handheld uses. 
   
   Another state law bars drivers under 18 from using any type of cell phone. 
   
   Spriggs' lawyer, Scott Reddie, praised the ruling. Asked whether it might promote distracted driving, he declined to comment, but said, "If the state wants to broaden the law, they can write new legislation." 
   
   The state could appeal to the California Supreme Court.
target: – Using a smartphone to look a map while driving is allowed under the California law that bans motorists from talking or texting on a handheld phone, an appeals court has decided. The court sided with Steven Spriggs, who was fined $165 after a highway patrol officer spotted him looking at a map on his iPhone while stuck in freeway traffic, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. The court noted that the law was enacted in 2006, a year before the first iPhone came out. The judges decided that the law only applied to conversations, and interpreting it otherwise would make it illegal to look at the time on a phone "or even to move it for use as a paperweight." Spriggs says the law should be written more clearly, adding that his son suffered a broken leg from a driver who was chatting on his phone and he definitely doesn't approve of distracted driving. "We're distracted all the time," he tells the AP. "If our distractions cause us to drive erratically, we should be arrested for driving erratically."