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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.
How do you think police issued tickets before radar guns were invented?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Look, just because there are no missing people, no unaccounted for deaths, or any evidence of any shape or form doesn't mean you didn't commit murder. I mean, you LOOK like a murderer. A trained police officer can't be wrong...
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So much for a fair trial.
So by now, who hasnt wiped their ass off with the bill of rights?
If he can't be trained to use a radar gun properly, then he's not qualified to guess what speed a vehicle is travelling...IMO.
Thanks but in light of this, I'll make a huge detour.
Sometimes they are not set with their radar but a driver is going way too fast for the situation and the fact is obvious to any observer. Cops in motorbikes without radar come to mind, for example. They should have a way to ticket that driver. The problem, obviously, is the gray area. How fast is too fast? Is too fast if they estimate the driver is 50% faster than the limit?
Perhaps a common sense solution to that kind of situation would be just to stop the driver. The mere fact of stopping someone is usually deterrent enough; I know I don't want to be stopped by the cops even if they don't give me a ticket. I wonder if that would work for the general case?
Where I live, the cops can ticket a driver for driving negligently. That should be enough to cover the "too fast but no hard evidence" case.
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.
Amen to that. Any conversation with a police officer should start with you saying "Evening officer, what seems to be the trouble?" - don't offer anything up, ever.
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If some car ZOOMS by it's pretty easy for me to tell its speeding, radar gun or not (I'm not a police officer). If you have even a modicum of experience driving and you can't estimate whether or not a car is speeding you should probably have your driver's license taken away.
If you're talking about someone doing 50 in a 30, you're correct that it's pretty easy. But the difference between 60 and 70 isn't as obvious as you may think. Calling it accurately, and consistently? BS. That's why they have Radar and LiDar and all their other toys, so they can catch the minor offenders as well.
Not just $50, that is the immediate cost. Don't forget the $200 increase in your mandatory auto insurance for the next 3 years.
There's a law against waiting till the cop is walking to your car, then put it in reverse, crank the wheel, floor it and flatten the crooked bastard, as well. The same sort of problem cropped up in Louisiana. Cops were targeting out of state tags and towing cars to impound for further inspection, even if you were speeding. Then you pay inflated rates for impound and your belongings were probably stolen and there would never be an investigation. So don't defend yourself against tyranny and injustice from crooked law enforcement by killing as many of the cockroaches as you can.
That would be illegal. But then so is jaywalking.
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Ugh, I got a reckless op once in Illinois... I "changed lanes too fast". The court didn't even see it. they had some administrator tell me I was wrong because they knew the officer was a "fair man." I moved back to Ohio because I've had better experience here... but apparently we are getting as bad as IL.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It's not analogous to condemning a person for "looking wrong". It's eyewitness testimony as evidence of a person's actions: "It looked like you were speeding" is analogous to "It looked like you stabbed that guy". Yes, eyewitness judgment can be wrong, but eyewitness judgment is not the same as "you look evil therefore you are guilty".
"You look like a murderer" is more analogous to "you look like a speeder". It is quite different from "it looked like you were speeding", and has nothing to do with the case being discussed here.
I'm starting to think that forcing the accused (in either civil or criminal proceedings) (and later found blameless) to pay for their defense and/or court appearance is a terrible injustice within our society.
Oh, no, don't worry - vehicular law has a get-out-of-jail-free card (pun soundly intended) in that, because automobile operation and licencing are a regulated activity, your rights don't extend to cover it. Hence why RIDE programs are legal, hence why so-called 'routine' traffic stops are legal. It's a nice grey area that your local cops live to bask in.
My uncle got a ticket for a speed higher than he was traveling, and the officer testified in court that speed was determined by time over distance between two very close markers. The officer thought the closer his markers, the more accurate the measurement. My uncle, a professor, tried to explain that human timing error meant that the closer the markers were, the LESS accurate the speed measurement was. The judge didn't understand, was frustrated, and finally said he thought my uncle was a speeder, and let the fine stand.
IIRC, the timestamps on New York Throughway tickets have been used to give people tickets before. I.e., you entered here, you left there, it took you so much time, bingo, average speed. Probably the same in other states. That's why I always planned my trips to include lunch or dinner stops on the throughway. I could do 80 and still average out to 55.
There really is nothing new in this story. Police are trained to estimate speeds. If they write a ticket based on that, you are likely to get the benefit of the doubt as to just how fast you were going, but not a cancellation of the ticket.
Exact same discussions? They were measuring speeds with a radar gun, not confronting the alleged speeder, but then mailing them a civil citation, fining them with no opportunity to prove their innoce-- oops I mean -- have the proof of their guilt be examined by a court?
The main issue with radar guns was technology and how much people trust equipment. The main issue with red light cams is basic due process.
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This is a great intro to why you should never talk to police. You have to show ID but you do not have to answer any questions /. story awhile back and bookmarked it because it is valid and useful.
Got this link off another
Never talk to Police
In a nut shell, the police will take what ever you say and use it against you.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There's no such thing as instantaneous speed. Velocity is always distance over time. If time is zero, that's a divide by zero.
You didn't do well in calculus, did you?
Roughly stated, speed traps and red light cameras cause people to slam on their brakes, which more than one study has shown causes the very accidents they're hoping to avoid.
The other big point of discussion used to be that when you need to find a cop, they shouldn't be hidden from view. Speed traps raise tons of revenue, but they make society as a whole less safe by leeching police presence and resources away from attending to actual crime and accidents.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
(Speed traps || Red Light cameras) are about raising revenue, not enforcing the law. They actually make driving less safe by causing drivers to slam on their brakes at unexpected times. They engender contempt for the law by making law enforcement about revenue generation and bill collection, not serving the public.
But yes, I'm in total agreement that red light cameras are a far more egregious case, though I would argue that radar speed traps paved the way for them, in the same way that red light cameras will pave the way for in-car black-box gps monitoring, where all apparent violations will be billed automatically to your credit card.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
That was pretty much the way it went with a traffic stop with me several years ago. I was scooting down a large road in a convertible with the top down. I saw him on his motorcycle going the other way, and didn't think anything of it. I ended up stuck in the middle of a large clusterfuck of cars, where a few roads merged. I heard the siren behind me, so I pulled over.
The conversation went pretty much the same. After asking me twice, he told me, "you're really making me mad. I'm going to walk away and come back, and you'd better tell me what I expect to hear." When he came back, I said the same thing, "No sir, I don't know why you stopped me.".
He had me get out of the car, patted me down, and told me I was going to jail. That's odd, since I still didn't know why he stopped me.
He believed I was speeding when he saw me a few minutes earlier. Well, his words were "you were passing the other cars like they were standing still." Since I wouldn't confess to anything, and he had nothing to prove his statement, he gave up. We ended up having a nice polite chat after that.
It's a lot easier for them if you just confess to whatever. "Oh ya, I must have been speeding, and I was following that car too closely." Great, 2 tickets with no proof.
Part of a traffic stop is high visibility. When the police have someone on the side of the road, it makes everyone slow down to the speed limit. By spending an extra 5 minutes with me stopped, even without a ticket, it brought the flow of traffic down to the legal limits.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
My ex got pulled over for "breaking the speed limit" based on the sound her car made. She was driving a 15 year old Toyota with a rusted out muffler. She was turning right onto a throughway from a dead stop at a stop sign. The cop was at the next cross street and pulled her over immediately. Based on the maximum acceleration of her car according to Toyota and the distance between the streets according to a map, it was physically impossible for her to be speeding where he claimed she was, even if she had the throttle fully open.
I had a nice little presentation prepared for her. The case would have been thrown out of court, had the cop shown up, which he didn't. So it was thrown out anyway. I still want the damn time I spent researching it back.
She should have been issued a repair order not a speeding ticket.
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Its this attitude that a little corruption is permissible that allows stuff like this to happen. The law is very often DAMN specific, and if you want to wield it, you better conduct the process with extreme precision. Officers doing traffic duty should be experts in car makes and models, considering the varying laws concerning older vehicles, capabilities, allowable modifications etc. A mistake like that in a legal case shows lack of precision in record keeping, as the make and model can easily be verified through the cars VIN. An officer who is a car expert would even be able to at least partially decode the VIN from memory ( enough for manufacturer codes and model distinctions). It is not unreasonable to ask that those who are charged with enforcing the law be very familiar with it, especially considering how nuanced vehicular law can be.
Good-bye
I would argue that the fact that he doesn't know what type of car he's writing a ticket to could mean that he has the wrong car. Maybe he saw another car speeding, couldn't locate it, and pulled me over instead.
A Mustang and a Charger are extremely hard to confuse if you remotely know anything about cars. One has two doors and one has four for a start.
Why should I have to negotiate? Admitting to broken equipment when I had none is illegal. Plain and simple.
Clerical error? Lets say a police officer is sent out to a crime scene and told that they are looking for a white male with a gun. The officer runs up to the scene, looks around and finds the first guy he can, which happens to be a black guy. He arrests that black guy and writes up the incident report stating he arrested a white guy. Clerical error?
Again, I don't know if I was speeding. I'm almost 30 and have only had one other speeding ticket. That was when I was 16. Maybe I was speeding, but 4mph over the limit, with no other cars on the road, in an area where the limit changes from 55 to 45 back to 55 in less than 100 yards is a little extreme. Speeding tickets are 100% about generating revenue, nothing more.