If he said 79mph in order to do the defendant a favor or lessen his paperwork, wouldn’t that be perjury?
You are correct. I think that is the larger problem instead of this ruling.
Which is why he said “at lest 79mph”.
Again, this is the CSI effect. If there’s no lab report, it didn’t happen. Except courts have allowed eyewitness testimony since Anglo-Saxon days. If you punch me, then I defend myself, and the cops arrest us both for battery, how can it be determined which of us threw the first punch? There was no video camera, no radar gun, there’s forensic evidence that both of us punched each other in the face (bruises on the face and bruises on the knuckles) but the forensic evidence can’t tell whether you punched me first or I punched you first.
The only evidence in this case is eyewitness testimony. I testify that you punched me first, you testify that I punched you first, and it’s up to the jury or judge if any of the testimony is credible.
I’ve been given a ticket for a California stop at a red light. There was no video evidence of this, if I had fought the ticket it would have been the cop’s word against mine. There are all kinds of traffic violations that don’t leave behind physical evidence. If we disallow eyewitness testimony from the cops then whole swathes of laws become unenforceable.
The solution is to allow eyewitness testimony and allow the court to weigh the evidence and determine if it is credible.
Read my post. If you think the officer is lying about having the ability to estimate the speed of a car, then test him.
I would imagine it could involve picking two fixed points like telephone poles or mile markers and counting off “1 Mississippi…” style how long it takes a car to travel between them. By my own calculations, given two points 500 feet apart (say, 4 telephone poles), you can be accurate within about 5mph or so until you start getting into ridiculous speeds.
As someone who directly works with the trial system, I’m curious as to your opinion on why it is the case that police show amazing levels of good faith and honesty. I would submit that the system simply wouldn’t work if some level of trust could not be placed in the expert opinion and professionalism of law enforcement officers.
This is crazy. You have a technology available and in widespread use that makes estimation unnecessary. Use it. Get it right. The police officer is in the wrong.
The assumption by the OP is that police testimony can’t be trusted. Then it compares traffic violations to crimes. Traffic violations have a lower burden of proof than crimes, and a judge can simply rely on the ‘credibility’ of the police officer. This works out well for the state, because the typical trial for a speeding ticket consists of ‘you’, someone who has an interest in the outcome, and is assumed to be biased, and the police officer who will be considered unbiased because he has no interest in the outcome. The deck seems stacked, but what else would you do?
The original assumption implicates all of the police for the bad acts of a few. In the speeding ticket scenario, police officers have little incentive to lie in the vast majority of cases. Even when ‘quota’ systems are in effect where police officers are expected to issue a minimum amount of tickets per month, how hard is it to find speeders? In the case of ‘speed traps’ where a police department’s budget and revenue is largely based on speeding tickets, there is a problem because the police officer has an interest in the outcome. Those situations are limited though, usually a ‘small town’ type of thing. But it’s not fair to smear all police officers for those cases.
When you jump to criminal cases, things do change. There are some obvious reasons why the police are dishonest in those cases. They may be covering up mistakes, which if revealed at trial will reflect badly on them, or which they may be prosecuted for themselves. They may be covering up the bad acts of someone else in law enforcement, or out of it. But in criminal trials testimony by the state is generally subjected to more scrutiny, although if you can’t afford a good lawyer, that may not help.
There is a simple means of avoiding these problems though, don’t get caught.
Yes, but what if the USS Nimitz was painted bright yellow?
So, officer, since you say “at least 79”, there is no possible way that it could have been 78mph? With what degree of certainty are you sure that my client was traveling “at least 79mph” as opposed to 78.9 mph?
I’m kind of satisfied with the way cops do it now, for the most part. They look at all the cars going by at 10-15 MPH over the limit and select the one car that is obviously going even faster than that. That’s how it seems to work here in Northern VA anyway. As long as they aren’t selecting by race or similar I think it works. In the end, we have to accept some part of a cops word, either what he saw, who he claims to have pointed the radar gun at or whether he was actually even there. Otherwise we need to just dispense with police all together. I have no great love for police but, given a traffic cop’s word and a driver’s word I 'm going to believe the cop. Of course, this is why it’s vital for the police force to be as honest as possible in all cases.
There are lots of ways car speed can be accurately calculated by machines and I would rather not have any of them. I used to drive a toll road in WV where they gave you a ticket at one end and collected at the other end. The ticket had a time stamp. It was very easy to see that my average speed for the whole trip was over the speed limit yet I never got in trouble. I like it like that.
That’s a reasonable line of questioning, and the judge can weigh the total evidence and assign whatever weight he’d like. But the cop in this instance is still a trained expert, specifically trained to estimate speeds, which seems to be lost on some in this thread. There is weight associated with that fact. It’s not some random guy taking a guess.
Perhaps this line of questioning leads the judge to assume the guy was going at least 70 in a 55 MPH zone (or whatever). But the fact that human judgment is involved doesn’t automatically make it a “get out of jail free” card.
Of course there’s a possible way. But to anticipate your next question, it’s more unlikely, since my training and experience allows me to estimate speeds accurately to within three miles per hour. It’s even possible that it was 78 miles per hour, although quite a bit more unlikely. It’s possible that it was 77 miles per hour, although tremendously unlikely. And so forth. But your client cannot get off the hook for the mere possibility that I’m wrong. It has to be a reasonable doubt, not an acknowledgment of the mathematical fact that no real-world estimation is 100% accurate; each will be 100% minus epsilon.
“I believe he was actually doing 82 mph. However, I know that my estimates can be off by up to three mph so all I can say for certain is that he was going between 79 and 85 mph. Therefore I stated he was driving at least 79 mph because that is the lowest figure I’m certain of.”
It may be as simple as the majority of police officers, like the majority of people, are generally decent and honest. Also, for the most part, they understood their role, and didn’t take the outcome of any particular trial overly personal, especially for the less serious crimes. They have lots and lots of people they can arrest and help convict, and don’t get too bent out of shape if one or two get acquitted. (remember also that 95% of defendants plead guilty to something rather than go to trial). Finally, they probably improve their credibility on the big stuff by honestly admitting (usually minor) facts that supporting the defense.
It is undoubtedly true that rampant dishonesty by police would break down the trust of the citizens in the whole process, and I think you’ve seen that from time to time in certain places and among certain populations. You’d start to have juries that questioned and doubted every word at trials from cops. I’m not sure, however, individual officers are thinking about the “big picture” that much. They don’t want to get caught in a lie, and it’s easier to tell the truth than worry which lies they can get away with and which ones will blow up in their face.
First off eyewitness testimony has been studied for a long time and shown to have significant problems. People have gone to jail for a long time on the basis of eye witness testimony that eventually was proven to be completely false (the person giving the testimony may not be lying, they may believe what they are saying but they get the information wrong).
Second, if you and I fight we have a he said/she said issue. In the case of the police though the court automatically, in the case of speeding, takes the officer’s word. End of story. Does not matter what you say. Cop says you were speeding then you were speeding regardless of the truth. If police say you were going 80mph and you say yeah, I was speeding but I was making a point of not speeding too much and was only going 65mph tough tooties. Cop is right, you are wrong and that is the end of it.
Further, consider the “4mph” accuracy claim. Sounds more like a carnival act where they guess your weight or age. Four mph seems pretty close but is it?
If the cop estimates I am going 25mph then he has an error margin covering 21-29 miles per hour. That spread is 32% of 25mph! Not very accurate in my book.
Try 85mph. That is 81-89. A bit less than 10%. Getting better but good enough?
I am curious if the claim of 4mph accuracy is an average. Does it change at different speeds but on average it is a 4mph error or do they always hit within 4mph? Does it change depending on the background (e.g. known markers are available or not, trees in the background, cars going the other way in the background, heavy vs. light traffic, etc.)? Has anyone actually tested this? Are the courts just accepting on face value
So, not surprising they can guess with some accuracy. They merely need to be close like a carni worker and the spread covers them.
I agree most police will be fairly honest. I also am sure some will abuse this system (be it to harass someone without probable cause or to pad a quota or whatever). How much of that are we willing to put up with so they catch a few more people speeding?
As noted the tech exists today to accurately measure a car’s speed and I doubt there is a police department in the country without them. So why do we have to rely on a guess at all?
Sometimes the cop is not out looking for speeders with a radar gun. Sometimes, he’s just finishing up his doughnuts and sees a car fly by at 67 to 73 mph and decides he better go get that guy.
It’s not as automatic as you claim. But generally, yes, the cop will be considered to be more reliable than the defendant. But judges or jurors.
Here’s the reality. The defendant is facing a penalty if he is convicted of speeding. He has a reason to lie.
The cop has nothing riding on the outcome. He won’t be rewarded or punished based on the outcome of this case.
So looking at it objectively, the cop’s testimony is more likely to be unbiased and truthful than the defendant’s.
Now some would argue that the cop does have a motive to lie. His boss will be angry if he is shown to have made a false arrest. So he’ll lie to protect himself. But that raises the question of why a cop would put himself into such a position. Why give somebody a ticket if you know you’re going to have to lie about it in court and put yourself at risk? Let the innocent driver go and wait for an actual speeder. Let’s face it, speeders aren’t rare - drive anywhere for an hour and you’ll see a dozen people driving over the speed limit. Any cop can easily make his hypothetical quota without ticketing any innocent people.
I agree in most cases cops would not lie. Yet we know that police can and do lie.
More than that though is the essentially open door they have now to pull anyone over at a whim. All they need to do is say that in their opinion the person was speeding and that’s that. I have personally been pulled over by a cop merely to be harassed. I am a clean cut guy, was in a nice and well operating car in a good neighborhood very near where I lived. My crime? Teenager. Cop help me for 30 minutes, checked my license, checked the passenger’s license, went to the neighbors house I was in front of to talk to them to see if I had done anything, had me open the car for a thorough search by him. I had done nothing, had nothing illegal, was completely sober and drug free. After all that he let me go with a warning to get out of his sight in 5 minutes or he’d arrest me for a curfew violation. Kidjanot. I knew my rights and this guy was walking over them but I had somewhere to be and did not want to make a fuss so politely complied.
Anecdotal sure but that happened to my white-ass in a nice white neighborhood. I strongly suspect getting pulled over for driving-while-black is far more common.
Allowing police even more latitude to pull you over when they feel like it seems a bad thing to me especially when the crime we are stopping is that civic revenue stream called speeding.
Yes, eyewitness testimony is inaccurate. If I were a defendant in a trial, and an eyewitness gave incriminating testimony against me, I’d want my lawyer to bring this up in my defense.
No. Why do you think this? The court didn’t rule that cops must always be believed. You’re perfectly free to argue during your trial (or proceeding or whatever) that the cop was mistaken, and if the judge believes you rather than the cop, then you win your case. The judge doesn’t automatically believe the cop. The judge might feel that the cop has no reason to lie, while you have a good reason to lie, but that’s not automatic.
Of course it changes, and the “+/- 4 mph” is just a number. If you want to impeach the officer’s testimony, then you’re entitled to do so during your defense. But just as the judge won’t automatically believe the cops, neither will they automatically disbelieve them. If the cop claims to be able to pretty accurately estimate the speed of a vehicle, and you don’t challenge that claim, then the claim goes unchallenged.
Because in this case the cop was supposedly untrained in the use of a radar gun, and therefore the driver wanted the rader gun data thrown out. But the cop also testified that he estimated the speed visually.
This is not a change in procedure. Cops have always had the power to testify as to various things they saw you do. They don’t need a videotape of you commiting a crime before they can charge you with a crime. No one’s eyewitness testimony is unimpeachable, or automatically believable. However it certainly is true that people who commit crimes are very likely to lie and claim they didn’t, so testimony from a defendent that they’re innocent must take that into account. It is up to the judge and/or jury to decide what testimony, if any, they believe. And if they find the state can’t meet the burden of proof, then that’s it.