Slashdot Mirror
Guess My Speed and Give Me a Ticket, In Ohio
quall writes "The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that police may estimate your car's speed and issue a ticket if they believe you were speeding. The hearing threw out a radar gun as evidence because the officer was not qualified to use it, but apparently his guess was good enough. If you make your way into Ohio, I suggest driving 5mph under the speed limit because this leaves little room to dispute your ticket in court. The only chance you have is if the issuing officer decides to skip your hearing."
I wonder whether the court would also accept a driver's own GPS log as exculpatory evidence.
It's doubtful that you could show an appropriate chain of evidence with the GPS. It's easily argued that you tampered with any such evidence.
Ticketing for illegal speeds is pretty easy, most people confess to it.
"Do you know why I pulled you over?"
"I was speeding."
"I saw you doing 80mph"
"Yes sir, that's about right. I'm sorry."
Voila, instant ticket for 80mph, and a confession to back it up.
I did the opposite. You never *KNOW* why the officer stops you. You may have been speeding. He may be pulling you over for a burned out taillight, or your vehicle may match a description of one seen at a crime scene, or it may even match the description of a vehicle from a missing persons case. Don't guess.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
In the UK, it used to involve two police officers.
One would drop their arm, raise a flag or some other indicator as a fast-looking vehicle passes...
The other would time how long it takes from the time that the first officer indicates to the time that the vehicle passes him. Since the two of them are a known distance apart, say 100 yards or so, it would be trivial to calculate the speed.
So if the driver was speeding or does something (braking like crazy to slow down) to raise reasonable suspicion, he'd be ticketed accordingly.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?
Well if I didn't know any better, and thought there was no way to measure velocity prior to the invention of radar, I might do as you have invited me to do and imagine that they just guessed and that this was good enough.
But since I do know better, I don't have to imagine. What they actually did was to time how long it took you to go between two points of known separation. Amazing, eh?
Even as late as the 90s some officers preferred this method, and sometimes near speed traps in the city you could see the markings on the curb that they drew. When it was explained to me by an officer, I believe he said the preference stemmed from when radar guns were new and tickets based on radar guns were being challenged successfully, while the stopwatch measurement of a trained officer was more likely to be believed by the judge.
In any event, "guess" was never the proper method.
The enemies of Democracy are
It isn't a valid question, judges in Ohio get a salary that is paid no matter how many tickets are issued or not. They do not get commissions or anything of the sort. It may be that the fund the actual salary comes from is supplied or supplemented by citations, but it wouldn't effect their salary or benefits if no citations or twice as many was ever processed.