It’s not bad enough that there are some significant issues with the accuracy of radar used to clock speeders, or trees moving at 70 miles per hour. Hey, technology isn’t perfect. But that’s no longer an issue in Ohio, now that the Supreme Court has upheld the old school method of nailing speeders.
In Barberton v. Jenney, the 5-1 court held that a police officers “unaided visual estimation of a vehicle’s speed” is sufficient for conviction.
“Independent verification of the vehicle’s speed is not necessary to support a conviction for speeding,” assuming the officer has been trained and certified by the Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy or similar organization, Justice Maureen O’Connor wrote for the court’s majority.
Obviously, as Justice O’Connor’s holding suggests, my assertion that it’s magic is mere snark. It’s not just magic, but magic by an officer trained and certified by the Ohio satellite school of Hogwarts. If cop training school says a cop is certified in magic, then he must be.
The ability to stand in a spot, eyeball a vehicle for a split second and opine, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it was traveling 87 miles per hour is quite remarkable. Indeed, a skill to be envied. Even though I’ve been driving for more than 30 years, I still have to look at my speedometer to know how fast I’m going. I’m such a muggle.
We have a long history of attributing magical skills to police officers. They can smell a miscreant a mile away, which is why they are entitled to search black and Hispanic youths at will for drugs or guns. It’s a sixth sense, having nothing whatsoever to do with racial profiling. They know who is lying and who is telling the truth, just by squinting their eyes and lifting a brow. It’s uncanny how every perp they drag to lockup is the guilty one. They just know it.
Over time, however, courts have been increasingly denying what the public and police have long accepted, that some people are just capable of discerning bad from good, wrong from right, by mere sensation. The hunch. The scent. The vibrational manifestation. How they do it is beyond a lawyer like me, but the cops just have the gift.
Now the Ohio Supreme Court, rejecting the slavish reliance on technology and evidence, has embraced the magic that keeps our streets safe by acknowledging that police do, indeed, enjoy the ability to perform magic. They can’t quite phrase it that way, as that would make them look stupid, so it’s incumbent upon the court to wrap it up in a bow by providing that only self-certified magic is acceptable magic. Anything less would be, well, ridiculous.
This ruling will, no doubt, present a problem for those drivers who deny that they were speeding, and disagree with the police officer’s “unaided” (hah! As if magic isn’t an aid.) assessment of his excessive speed. There’s no arguing with magic. The officer says so, and so it hereby is.
We could, of course, create some difficult hypothetical, say with the Pope driving the Popemobile from Youngstown to Cincinnati in order to get to a prayer breakfast, when the Pope slept late and nobody woke him (who wants to be the one who wakes the Pope?). While driving at the top end of the speed limit, the Pope was very careful to never exceed it. That would be wrong. Suddenly, flashing red lights behind the Popemobile and he’s pulled over by an agnostic for doing 76 in a 70 mile zone. The Pope denies all wrongdoing. Who wins?
The Ohio Supreme Court has now answered the question. Do you believe in magic?
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“Well,” the prosecutor explained, “who are you going to believe? This decorated police officer or this former member of the Hitler Youth?”
Oh, goody; we haven’t disagreed in a while.
If I understand this correctly (I’m not in the trade, but I did have to do a fair amount of research for a novel, including sitting with a cop friend shooting radar), the claim by the prosecutor, the cop, and accepted by the court is that the cop was not only trained in visual estimation of speed, but had demonstrated, under testing, accuracy in doing that.
I’m skeptical about the “within three or four miles per hour” (could anybody reliably determine that a car was going 105 rather than 110?), but the guy I was with — on that day, at that time; I’m Fair Witnessing here — was never off by more than 5 mph when he confirmed his guess with the radar gun, and was within one or two mph of what the radar gun said it was most of the time. (He’d picked a spot where the usual failures of radar weren’t likely.)
I spent a bit of time trying it myself — with him doing the radar stuff; the deal was that I wasn’t to go touching equipment I don’t know how to operate, which seemed fair enough to me — and I got pretty close, too, although not that good.
So, I dunno, but I don’t think that something that’s repeatable under test is magic.
As to the writing-the-ticket-for-less-than-what-the-radar-said thing being to give the driver a break, though, sheesh. That’s pretty standard practice, I’m told, mainly because people rarely fight the smaller tickets. If a cop really wants to give a guy a break, he can say something like, oh, “stay off the cell phone when you’re speeding, and you have a nice day, Joel.”
Maybe it is something that can be taught, but the problem as I see it is that this Court has given the police yet another basis for a pre-textual stop that can and will be abused to know end. The magical power of speed detection will lead to a stop, whereupon the magical sense of smell takes over, etc.
Now that I have your personal anecdote in hand, it changes everything and I therefore immediately adopt your belief that all cops everywhere, under any conditions and circumstances, are endowed with the ability to visually determine speed of moving vehicles and are exceptionally good looking. Or maybe it doesn’t at all. It’s kinda hard to say.
Only a mudblood would be so disgraceful as to use it for pretextual, even profiling, stops.
Mudblood? Ya gotta help me out here. Although the context is giving me some clues.
🙂 I figured it would.
Montana used to have no marked speedlimits, and at some point that was deemed unconstitutional. Something along the lines of people needing notice of what behavior is wrong; it couldn’t just be left up to the cop’s judgment to decide what was reasonable for them to be driving post hoc the actual driving.
This case is obviously different (there is presumably a posted limit) but I wonder if the Montana case could cover it. You can’t use post hoc police judgment because it just isn’t sufficiently knowable to the driver. (We know what a well-calibrated radar gun would say; we do not know what a quota-filling cop might.)
Scott – Love the ‘magic’ reference!
When trying to explain something as inexplicable as this Decision to my step-daughters or wife, I prefer the term ‘Unicorn’. Same intent, but w/eye widening attention getting paid. Keep up the good fight!
-Dan
I shall watch out for the “Calibrated Eyeball Cops” in Ohio.