The cop kinda ruined his testimony by saying his “eyes never left me” which I was able to show better not be so. But you see, cops dont usually issue a ticket for a few miles over the speed limit.
So, if the cop hadnt been wrong, I would never have gotten a ticket.
See this is where I’m having the problem with all of this.
Cop automatically believed over the defendant because cop doesn’t have a reason to lie and the defendant does. Does not imply the defendant is lying simply because their version is different.
Eyewitness testimony eliminating reasonable doubt. What percentage in criminal court (which also uses reasonable doubt) has the state produces one witness, the defendant gives their side and without any circumstancial evidence the person is convicted. In fact let’s go further and ask if a significant number of people convicted that way were later found (or suspected) to be innocent?
The defendant is de facto forced to prove their innocence - and that is nearly impossible to do. So the cop that popped me* is assumed to be more truthful to me - if not for the reasons listed in this thread then the assumption the Judge told me about which was I would not have been given a ticket if I weren’t guilty. So how do I now prove beyond a reasonable doubt (without a dashcam that I don’t have) that I did follow the law?
In all fairness to cops, most (all but this time) of the times I have been stopped I did violate the law and the court system dealt very fairly with me. And getting back to the OP and not my case, it seems to me that given the HUGE weight given to police testimony - enough to convict people who cannot prove their innocence that there should be an equally huge responsibility and accountability if they are wrong. My question is: is there? For the poster who got popped when it was shown the cop couldn’t see his car over the hill, what would happen if he reports it to the cop’s supervisor? Will the Judge discount that cop’s testimony in later cases? Is it a black mark (officially or unofficially) in his record if caught blatantly lying in traffic court like “I saw them speeding.” “What?! Through the brick wall shown in this picture?”
I have no idea what would happen if I reported it to the cop’s supervisor. The thought never crossed my mind, but my guess is nothing would happen.
I don’t know if the judge will discount the officer’s testimony in future cases. I don’t even think he should. The officer was scrupulously honest when testifying. If anything, his testimony in my case probably makes him more credible in the judge’s eyes. The officer’s ticket book showed that he issued the tickets back to back, and with less time between the tickets (one minute) than it generally took him to get a reading and pull a car over. He admitted that he pulled me over at the same time as the car in front of me. He admitted that my ticket was issued based on the radar reading of that car. If he had lied, that would have been the end of my case. He also confirmed the reliability of my photos. He could have denied that he set up his radar where I said he did and said that he had a better view than my photos indicated. Instead, he vouched for them.
The truth is, I don’t think he lied. I think he made an honest mistake. I think that when he was checking the radar reading of the car in front of me, he didn’t see me catch up to that car. While he was checking the radar reading and writing the note in his book or maybe starting to call the stop in on the radio, I caught up. He saw both of us together at the bottom of the hill and he assumed we’d been together the whole time. Or his memory played a little trick on him and he mis-remembered seeing me at the top of the hill too. This was likely just a mistake of ordinary fallibility.
Judges understand that police officers have ordinary fallibility. But judges also know that defendants have both ordinary fallibility and an incentive to lie. Given that, and the fact that the standard of proof for most tickets in most states is “the preponderance of the evidence,” the judge is understandably more inclined to believe the officer than the defendant. I’m not surprised by that. I don’t think most people should be surprised or offended by that.
This bias does create the potential for abuse. If judges always defer to cops, cops have the almost unchecked potential to abuse their authority, but I wasn’t in such a place. I feel bad for people who do live in those places.