Radar guns are used by pitching coaches and police officers to gauge how fast an object is traveling, but can we trust the accuracy of these instruments? In baseball, it doesn’t really matter if a pitch was measured at 87 miles per hour or 83 miles per hour, but for an officer of the law, it’s imperative that they can rely on their equipment to give an accurate assessment, because a person’s freedom or their hard earned money may be on the line.
As we’ve seen recently, we can’t always trust police equipment to provide accurate information, so you should be leery of any police officer who says they caught you traveling at a specific speed with a radar gun. You’ll want to contest that citation in court, and in today’s blog, we spotlight the best ways to challenge a radar gun speeding ticket.
Fighting A Radar Gun Speeding Ticket
Don’t just assume that the officer’s radar gun is perfectly accurate. If you’re going to attack the citation on the grounds that the radar gun wasn’t used properly, here’s what we recommend.
1. Connect With A Lawyer – First and foremost, our top recommendation for fighting almost any criminal case is to connect with a defense lawyer. We understand the science behind a radar gun and we know some of the best ways to cast doubt over its accuracy. We’ll share some of those techniques below, but this defense is typically best developed and pitched in court by a lawyer who has tackled equipment failures as they pertain to evidence collection in the past.
2. Review Maintenance Records – Equipment like breath test devices and radar guns need to be serviced at regular intervals to ensure their accuracy. Your lawyer can get the maintenance logs for the specific device that was used in your traffic stop to see if it had been calibrated as legally required.
3. Check The Officer’s Certifications – There’s more that goes into using a radar gun than simply pointing it at a moving object. Officers are required to take certain certifications and courses to ensure they know how to use, store and record information collected by the device correctly. We may look into the officer’s background with the device and their training to ensure they know how to properly handle the equipment and log any collected evidence.
4. Did They Get The Right Vehicle? – If the officer was capturing speeds on a busy highway, it’s certainly possible that the officer’s radar collected the speed of a different vehicle but they pursued you. We may use a recreation of the scene, video evidence and even angles and mathematics to suggest that it’s unlikely that the officer knows for certain that they actually captured your speed and not some other vehicle.
5. Expert Testimony – Finally, we may even bring in an expert in the field to break down the the technical side of the radar capturing device if we believe their testimony could prove helpful to your case. Most people have a pretty rudimentary understanding of radar devices, but an expert witness can break it all down in layman’s terms and give credence to your argument that the data that was collected may not be all that accurate.
Let us help contest your next traffic ticket for you. We’ll put our decades of legal expertise to good use and ensure you get a fair shake when your case is heard in court. For more information, or for help with a different legal concern, reach out to Avery and the team at Appelman Law Firm today at (952) 224-2277.
