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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.
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Now the laws of physics are under the jurisdiction of Cook County? The ol' speed of light is pretty much a constant, even in the non vacuum of earth's atmosphere. So now the work of the police and the money spend to enforce laws is wasted because someone can't grasp how a LIDAR gun works.
What about the photographs used as evidence in court? Another unproven light based technology.
Give me a freaking break.
Plus, in all the years I have almost never seen a cop checking speed (with the exception of about 30th street on LSD). I kind of got the impression that when it comes to moving violations in Chicago as long as you weren't in the commission of a drive by the cops had other things to do. Guess I was wrong.
I was popped on Mannheim Road about six years ago. The cop came up behind me, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I thought he was off chasing another emergency -- nope, he was pulling me over. He comes running up to my car as I rolled down my window and yells, "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING GOING 73 MILES AN HOUR?!" I basically pleaded with him that I wasn't going 73, not even close. I wasn't even speeding! Very abruptly he says, "okay, I'll put you down for 48 then." In short, I got a speeding ticket because of a faulty radar gun.
The issue is really the City's refusal to *follow the precedent* of the courts.
It is well established that the threshold for admissibility in IL for scientific evidence is a Frye hearing. It might seem silly in this case, but believe me, you want there to be a threshold for evidence--otherwise *any* kind of crackpot theory could be called "scientific" and accepted as evidence against you in court.
The Frye hearing just makes sure the evidence really is based in scientific fact. Once that's established, the courts can accept it as evidence. If LIDAR is that foolproof and that easy to use, this should be a slam dunk for the City. Instead, they want the courts to *completely ignore legal precedent* in Illinois and give them a "pass".
Yeah.... because we should always give the *City of Chicago* the benefit of the doubt.
Marcus, why are you crediting the Trib with this. Mark Brown blew the whistle on this last week in the Sun-Times.
Nov. 6:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/1868508,CST-NWS-brown06.article
Nov 8:
http://www.suntimes.com/news/brown/1870690,CST-NWS-brown08.article