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.
You make fine arguments on this thread, but I see from your profile that you do not live just outside of Detroit. I think that you are around a more honest pack of government agents than I am. My problem is with the potential for abuse and it is based on how I see the abuse already in the system.
Lucky for you and me they have no time to trump up speeding cases because there are so many real speeders the cops can't even eat a full dough nut between chasing after another.
Being wrongly accused is a civics lesson you will never forget. Once you have, you not think cops spend time lying setting someone up, throwing away their pride,integrity,and guts(why we call them P.I.G.) to get a speeding ticket fine into the coffer. If they falsify a case against you it will be something heavy like homicide or a pot seed in your sock.
More than you would think. Lots of new cars have a black box which does this already. Every GPS receiver I know of will also record the maximum speed since being reset. That, plus sworn testimony from witnesses who were in the vehicle at the time, would be pretty persuasive in court.
The point is that these problems would be absolutely no different from the current situation. Who's to say the officer isn't lying about what the radar said? It always comes down to his testimony anyway, whether there's a radar involved or only his estimate.
All to overcome the opinion of one cop. That's a rigged system and you must know it, my FRiend.
Considering the training and experience that the one cop must accumulate to have his professional opinion and estimate carry weight in court, I believe it's a matter of him earning it.
The fact is, the one cop might spend 8-12 hours a day, 5-7 days a week watching cars come and go, and probably gets constant feedback from a radar gun to train his speed estimation. That's how it worked for me anyway. It's simply a matter of hours and hours of practice and training. You really do get to where you can estimate it with pretty good accuracy.
If you have complaints about the way the courts work in general, in terms of the burden of proof and the weight a LEO's testimony carries, I'm afraid that's a bit outside of my field, and probably outside this thread too.
It's true that his visual estimate isn't going to give the accuracy of a radar lock. Any officer who gave anything more specific than a range ("The vehicle appeared to be traveling approximately 45-50 MPH") would be questionable.
But specifying an exact speed isn't required to show a vehicle was over the limit. If the officer can say that he's certain, based on his estimation, that the vehicle was not traveling at or below the speed limit, but some significant rate higher, then it would be enough.
So it would be a "mistake" only if the officer was far enough off that a vehicle he estimated was speeding was actually not. Given that most LEOs don't write citations until you're going well over the limit (10-15 MPH over is common), and that estimating a vehicle's speed to within +/- 5 MPH isn't terribly difficult for an experienced traffic cop, that's a pretty unlikely mistake.
Yeah, in that case it would.
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