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I assume it was a radar ticket.
I remember an article in the Boston Globe years ago, would probably have been in the late winter of '79-80 because we had moved to Granby CT by then and were still going out on Sunday morning and finding a Boston Globe. Aman was stopped in Lincoln for doing 35 in a 25 zone ... driving a Jeep pickup with a snow plow bouncing around on the front. (That should have been a clue to the cop right there taht he couldn't get an accurate reading.) He went to court to fight it, but as his own expert witness. He worked at Draper Labs building sophisticated military radar systems, and as a specialist gave credibility to the arguement of the incredible inaccuracies of police radar systems. One thing I remember him saying was that the radar systems he designs reject any reading of less than 6 seconds as a ghost, and that there is no way that a less sophisticated police system can "lock on" to a reading in a few milliseconds.
If you have access to the Globe archive, I've given you a timeframe to look in. Find the article and use it to whatever advantage you can.
Also look for an article from Car and Driver back in the mid to late '80s where they tested police radar units. Some of them were quite inaccurate, particularly the cheapest, and therefore most used one. They used a stretch of unopened freeway near their offices. Some cars got quite close before they were picked up (I'd expect a SAAB 99 to be in that catagory except for the verticle radiator), others were picked up at quite a distance. The 18-wheeler was picked up as soon as it crested the hill, 1-1/4 miles away. The point is, if there was _any_ other vehicle in sight he can't PROVE that the reading came from your car. Police radar has no distance and vector capability, and the reflected signal could have come from anywhere within the "cone" range.
A former co-worker told me that when he was stationed down at Klamath Falls while in the Air Force, if anyone on base got a radar speeding ticket, they took it to court and took one of the radar specialists with them. They _always_ won the case.
posted by 216.239.166...
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