Laser Gun Speeding Tickets Questioned

The City's law department may have to tinker with the way speeding motorists are ticketed as more and more tickets based on laser gun readings are being dismissed by traffic court judges. The Tribune explains:

Within the past year judges in Cook County Traffic Court in Chicago determined that speeds captured by lidar were not admissible because the devices had not been proven scientifically reliable in an Illinois court, said Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the law department, which prosecutes most speeding tickets in the city.

The judges brushed aside the office's position that such a legal hearing was unnecessary because lidar devices, which use a light beam instead of radio waves, have been used by police departments across the country with no problems for a long time and because some courts outside Illinois already had found them to be scientifically sound.

City officials have been reluctant to conduct what's known as a Frye hearing to prove the laser guns' reliability because such hearings can be long and expensive. According to Hoyle, if the state's attorney's office can't set up a Frye hearing, another course of action would be to try to implement a state law which legally recognizes the scientific validity of the laser guns.