Florida cop pulls over disabled, one-handed woman for holding cellphone while driving — but drops charges over ‘lack of evidence’
A Florida woman was pulled over by police for allegedly using her cellphone while driving, but the officer was surprised to discover she only had one hand. Kathleen Thomas challenged the citation, which was ultimately dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The incident highlights issues surrounding traffic enforcement and the assumptions made by law enforcement officers.
- ▪Kathleen Thomas was stopped by a Palm Beach County officer for suspected distracted driving.
- ▪The officer claimed to see her holding a phone with her right hand, but Thomas pointed out that she does not have a right hand.
- ▪The citation was dismissed in court due to a lack of evidence after Thomas challenged it.
3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 4 hours. Coverage spans 2 points on the political spectrum — 1 lean left, 1 centre.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | New York Post |
| Canonical URL | https://nypost.com/2026/05/27/us-news/florida-cop-pulls-over-disabled-one-handed-woman-for-holding-cell-phone-while-driving-but-drop-charges-over-obvious-lack-of-evidence/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 23:53:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-28T04:33:49.096Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T04:36:29.895Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | a48Rz7zDhX20 · 3 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
US News Florida cop pulls over disabled, one-handed woman for holding cellphone while driving — but drops charges over ‘lack of evidence’ By Caitlin McCormack Published May 27, 2026, 11:53 p.m. ET See more of our coverage in your search results. Add The New York Post on Google A Florida cop pulled over what he thought was a distracted driver using her cellphone while she whizzed past him — but was floored when he learned she only had one hand. Kathleen Thomas, 36, was pulled over by an officer with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office in February on suspicion of distracted driving. 4 Kathleen Thomas, 36, was pulled over for holding her phone while driving.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at New York Post.
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