Providence Distracted Driving Accident Attorneys

The other driver was on their phone. You are almost certain of it. And you have no idea how anyone would ever prove it. That gap, between what a crash victim knows happened and what can be established, is most of the work in a distracted driving case, and it is the part no one explains. At Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers, our Providence car accident attorneys represent people injured by distracted drivers throughout Providence County. From our Rhode Island office in Woonsocket, we build these cases for people injured in distracted driving crashes on Providence streets and highways.

Rhode Island runs two statutes here rather than one, and the first of them was rewritten effective July 2, 2025.

The section that used to be titled “Text messaging while operating a motor vehicle” is now titled “Distracted driving prohibited while operating a motor vehicle.” That is not cosmetic. The prohibition no longer targets texting specifically; it reaches using a wireless handset or personal wireless communication device to compose, read, or send text messages, or for any other purpose while driving. Scrolling counts. Watching something counts. Holding it and looking at it counts.

The 2025 amendments also built out the exceptions, which is where the practical line now sits. Navigation is permitted while the handset is mounted or otherwise affixed to the vehicle to allow hands-free operation. Hands-free use is permitted through an accessory, or by activating or deactivating a feature with the motion of a single swipe or tap. Emergency personnel performing their duties are excepted, as is contacting emergency responders, as is a vehicle parked or stopped out of the flow of traffic. The same amendment added a prohibition on non-emergency device use by drivers of pilot and escort vehicles.

The fines are one hundred dollars for a first conviction, one hundred fifty for a second, and two hundred fifty for a third or later, plus surcharges.

The second statute is Rhode Island’s hands-free law, in force since June 2018, which bars operating a vehicle while using a hand-held personal wireless device to engage in a call while the vehicle is in motion. A first offense carries a one hundred dollar fine, and the statute allows that fine to be waived on proof that the driver bought a hands-free device. Rhode Island has separate provisions restricting device use by drivers under eighteen and by school bus operators.

One thing we will not tell you, because no official source says it: neither statute states whether it is enforced as a primary or a secondary offense. It is worth noting what the legislature did elsewhere. Rhode Island’s seat belt statute expressly forbids stopping a vehicle to check compliance without reasonable suspicion of a violation. When Rhode Island wants to limit enforcement, it says so in the text. It said nothing of the kind in either distracted driving section.

Here is the part that surprises people. Proving the other driver violated the hands-free law does not automatically win your case.

Rhode Island does not treat a statutory violation as negligence in itself. Our courts have said it plainly for decades: the violation of a statute or ordinance is evidence for the trier of fact to weigh in deciding negligence, alongside all the other evidence, rather than a determination of it. So a phone record showing an outgoing text at the moment of impact is powerful, persuasive, jury-moving evidence. It is not a judgment.

It also means the reverse. A driver who was not technically violating the statute can still be negligent. Someone reaching for a coffee, turning to deal with a child in the back seat, eating, adjusting a screen mounted perfectly legally, or simply not looking, owes the same duty of reasonable care, and Rhode Island’s basic speed rule requires a speed reasonable and prudent for the actual conditions, with control sufficient to avoid colliding with other vehicles and pedestrians. Most distracted driving claims are not built on the phone statute at all. They are built on ordinary negligence, with the phone as the explanation for why it happened.

Rhode Island has no statute setting out how phone records are obtained in a civil case. That runs on the Superior Court Rules of Civil Procedure and, where a carrier is involved, on the federal Stored Communications Act. We also found no Rhode Island appellate decision on the admissibility of cell phone use evidence in a crash case.

What Rhode Island does have is worth knowing precisely because it is not a discovery rule. Section 39-2-24 makes it a crime to procure, sell, or knowingly receive another person’s telephone records without that customer’s authorization, and it defines those records to include the numbers dialed, the numbers received, the time a call started and ended, its duration, and the charges applied. It was written for pretexting and the trade in phone records, and it exempts a person acting under a valid court order or warrant. Read the exception carefully: it names a court order or a warrant, not a subpoena. That is a reason to obtain the other driver’s records through the driver rather than by going around them to the phone company.

Carrier records show calls and messages with timestamps. Getting them is less casual than it sounds. The Stored Communications Act draws a hard line between subscriber and transactional records on one side, and the content of communications on the other, and a civil subpoena is not a universal key to everything a carrier holds. In practice, these records are usually reached through discovery directed at the other driver, through an authorization, or by court order. Carriers also do not keep everything forever, so the request goes out early or not at all.

The device itself. Content, app activity, and screen state live on the handset rather than in the carrier’s billing system. Getting there is a discovery fight, and the scope of it matters, because no court is going to hand over someone’s entire phone because of a fender bender.

The vehicle. Infotainment and telematics systems in many vehicles log pairing, calls, and media activity independently of the phone. Vehicle event data recorders separately capture several seconds of speed, throttle, braking, and belt status around impact, and a total absence of braking is itself an argument about attention. Rhode Island has enacted no statute on ownership of or access to that data, so preservation is a practical problem: it is gone once the car is repaired or salvaged unless someone asked in time.

Rideshare and delivery app data, if the driver was working, which also changes whose insurance answers.

Human evidence. Witnesses who saw a lit screen. What the driver said at the scene. Photographs of where the phone was found. And in Providence specifically, the abundant camera coverage: the City’s own recent procurement describes roughly thirty-three intersection safety cameras and twenty speed cameras, and Rhode Island’s automated enforcement statutes expressly permit camera-produced evidence in civil proceedings under the ordinary rules of evidence. Nearby business cameras matter more and overwrite faster, often within one to four weeks.

A word about scene statements. In a city as multilingual as Providence, what a driver or witness supposedly admitted is often relayed through whoever happened to be standing there. The Rhode Island Supreme Court ordered a new trial in 2026 where a supervisor testified to what an injured plaintiff said through an unidentified on-scene Spanish interpreter, holding the testimony inadmissible hearsay without reliability behind it. Statements gathered that way are contestable in both directions.

Distraction concentrates where the environment demands the most attention and drivers give the least. Broad Street and Westminster Street lead the City’s own High-Injury Network, and that network, about a quarter of Providence’s street miles, accounted for ninety-two percent of the city’s fatal crashes and ninety-three percent of its serious injury crashes over a recent five-year period.

Downtown was the city’s second-worst neighborhood for crashes involving people walking, biking, and scooting in 2024, behind the West End, and forty-four percent of those crashes happened between noon and six in the evening, which is not the hour most people picture. Citywide, those crashes hit a sixteen-year high in 2025.

Rhode Island is a fault state with no personal injury protection and no threshold to clear, so a claim exists from the first dollar of harm: medical care past and future, lost earnings and reduced earning capacity, and pain and suffering. If you contributed to the crash, Rhode Island’s pure comparative negligence rule reduces the recovery by your percentage and never bars it.

Phone records, vehicle data, and nearby camera footage all expire, and most of them expire faster than people expect. Contact Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers for a free, confidential case review while there is still something to preserve. We are paid only if you recover.

This page is attorney advertising and general information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.