Posted on 06/02/2010 11:25:23 AM PDT by MissTed
Ohio's highest court has ruled that a person may be convicted of speeding purely if it looked to a police officer that the motorist was going too fast.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that an officer's visual estimation of speed is enough to support a conviction if the officer is trained, certified by a training academy, and experienced in watching for speeders. The court's 5-1 decision says independent verification of a driver's speed is not necessary.
The court upheld a lower court's ruling against a driver who challenged a speeding conviction that had been based on testimony from police officer in Copley, 25 miles south of Cleveland. The officer said it appeared to him that the man was driving too fast.
Thanks again. I am struggling and have such a memory problem,I can hide my own Easter eggs.
BINGO! You got it on that one. (I heard the Easter-egg joke at Weight Watchers today ... weird that it’d show up again!)
Aren’t you on the run? No wonder you exceed 150 mph.
B*ll Sh*t
Sure. Why shouldn't it be?
Nobody said the officer's estimate is unimpeachable, or iron-clad. It simply meets the intial burden of proof for a prima facie case. If you, as a defendant, have better evidence to the contrary, you'll probably beat him.
I'm surprised this needed a court ruling, frankly. I thought this was already the case pretty much everywhere.
How do you suppose speeding was prosecuted before radar guns were invented? Radar is better evidence, but certainly not the only kind.
Officer testimony is used in court all the time, for all sorts of offences. Why should speeding tickets be any different?
Thanks for your thoughtful and intelligent reply.
It's still a fact, whether you like it or not.
The problem here isn’t how accurate a LEO could be in estimating speed, but the potential for abuse in allowing officers to “make their case” solely on such grounds.
The problem here is potential for abuse. I’m not as worried about the 25% that can’t WAG a car’s speed as I am the 5% that would abuse the discretion to do so.
Gov’t - and its agents - must be kept in check. That is the essence of “limited government”.
Not TOO much of a disgrace, is it! I wonder if they can issue parking tickets to people who LOOK as though they might have parked illegally a while back?
TRANSLATION: Ohio has invented a whole new way to TAX!!!
Okay, now I know you’re havin’ fun with me. :)
That's certainly possible, but it would also catch up to the officer and eventually wreck his career. After you get smacked hard in court a few times with evidence that shows you're way off, your professional opinions and estimates soon don't mean much any more. When that happens, your usefulness as a LEO is greatly diminished.
The D/A's office really doesn't like to lose cases because of jerk cops, so those problems usually get sorted out over time.
I posted, for a limited time, on my home page the text of the petition I submitted to toss a speeding ticket in 2003.
I might well have been speeding, but, it was outside the jurisdiction of the officer that wrote the ticket by about 3 miles, he lied about the mile marker he put down on the ticket (which indicated the ticket occurred 5 miles back, in his town), and speeding or not, I was not breaking the law as the law in Texas specifically states that unsafe driving is the violation and operating a vehicle safely above a posted speed is NOT necessarily a violation of the law.
The city attorney postponed my case and never brought it back up (2 yr statute of limitations). In reality, despite everything else I said, his speed trap sign was illegally posted and he simply didn’t want to risk having to revisit 2 yrs worth of tickets.
In my opinion, you were speeding. No I wasn't.
Now what?
That's a real knee slapper.
Now what?
You'll probably lose.
But how is that any different from this:
"I had you on radar at 15 MPH over the limit."
"You're wrong."
???
The only difference is radar vs. estimate. The officer's testimony is still involved, as is yours. If he's a liar/jerk then he will be with or without a radar.
Like I said, this really isn't much of a change, if any.
It's a fact. I've known a few officers who aren't any more precisely because of that problem. They had no credibility left.
Wow! That virtually means there is no defense to speeding tickets. With all due respect LEO’s can testify any time that they thought the guy was speeding and its a done deal. The lone exception would be a cross examination which significantly undermines the officer’s credibility, but that’s not so easy to do.
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