14 DAY TRIAL // Rolando McClain, linebacker for the Oakland Raiders, reportedly got in trouble with the law by responding to a traffic ticket by swearing.
Instead of voicing his discontent, he chose to express it in writing on the citation he received, and was supposed to sign. In the signature section, he failed to put down his name.
“[Expletive] y'all," he wrote, right before he got arrested.
A Decatur, Alabama officer had pulled him over for driving a vehicle with tinted windows, local newspaper Decatur Daily chronicles.
Noticing the signature, patrol officer Derek Annerton asked him to reconsider, and sign the ticket using his real name.
“That is my name,” he responded, according to police spokesman Lt. John Crouch.
As a result, he was arrested for providing a false name on an official police document.
“You know who I am,” he allegedly told the officer when prompted him for license and insurance registration.
23-year-old McClain is a Decatur native, and a fixture in local news. Even so, police reps stress that the officer did not know his identity before pulling the player over, because his vehicle's window tint didn't allow him to see inside it.
“The tint was so dark that he immediately recognized that it was darker than what’s allowed by law. He couldn’t tell anything about the driver — couldn’t tell if it was male or female,” Crouch explains.
McClain is convinced he is being targeted by law enforcement. Asked by reporters if that is the case, he responds “Yes. You said it. I answered it.”
When he was asked about the tint, he explained that he requires it, due to a medical condition. After being arrested, jailed and freed on bail, he produced a letter from a doctor who diagnosed him with “photosensitivity” and noted he “needed maximum ultraviolet radiation protection to include window tinting.”
At the time, Annerton was not permitted by the driver to see the letter, or use a tint meter and determine the amount of light that passes through the windows. McClain also denied his supervisor, Sgt. Stan Elliott, the right to conduct said test. It was then that he received the ticket.