A lawyer says his win Friday in the Georgia Court of Appeals upends 40 years of law and could jeopardize outstanding traffic tickets throughout the state.

A three-judge panel held that a uniform traffic citation for following too closely wasn't detailed enough to support the charge against Antonio Strickland, whose mother's boss is Jackie Patterson, a traffic court lawyer.

Patterson represented Strickland and argued the Clayton County officer who issued the traffic ticket failed to allege the essential elements of the offense—listing only the name of the offense and the code section: “Following to[o] close[ly] in violation of code section 40-6-49.”

“The citation fails to allege any facts necessary to establish a violation,” wrote Judge Trent Brown, joined by Presiding Judge M. Yvette Miller and Judge Steve Goss. “While it indicates an accident occurred, the citation does not provide any details. It is unclear from the citation how the accident occurred, how many vehicles were involved, at what speeds the vehicles were traveling and the approximate distance between the vehicles.”

Patterson was elated. “I've been making this argument since the day I became a lawyer” in 1992, he said. “Due process is back.”

Patterson, whose co-counsel on the case was Brandon Dixon, said that, as a result of the decision, “Every municipal court and every solicitor has to change the way they do business.”

Clayton County Solicitor Tasha Mosley chuckled at that suggestion. “It's not catastrophic,” she said of the decision.

“This will require our officers to get more specific” in describing allegations. And if a ticket doesn't have enough detail, she added, her office can review a police report and produce an accusation that usurps the citation.

The downside of the formal accusation, she said, is that defendants who'd normally plead nolo contendere and pay a small fine online would have to show up in court.

Mosley said she had not decided whether she'd ask the state Supreme Court for review.

Patterson sounded confident, if the matter goes to the high court, because the decision is based on the justices' 2017 decision that reversed a sex offender's conviction for failing to notify authorities that he'd changed addresses.

Justice Robert Benham wrote for a unanimous court that defeating a motion to quash an indictment “requires more than simply alleging the accused violated a certain statute.”

Such an indictment “would not provide the accused with due process of law in that it would not notify the accused of what factual allegations he must defend in court,” Benham wrote. “Likewise, it would not allege sufficient facts from which a trial jury could determine guilt if those facts are shown at trial.”