Gotta love the system (at least some of the time). This is something that happened to a friend of mine recently and after he told me I got to thinking, this could blow the lid off a whole load of wrongdoings if it ever got made public knowledge. Not that I’m gonna do that!
Anyhow, its about a guy driving his car to visit some friends and a brush with some friendly police officers along the way. Well, my friend, who of course shall remain nameless in this story as he doesn’t want any reprisals, was driving along pretty slow that day. He even knew it was real slow, much slower than the residential speed limit as he was in no big hurry. It was a beautiful day and he was just enjoying the ride. Well, he almost had a coronary when a cop stood out in the street up in front and motioned him to pull over.
Seems that, according to the cop, he had been driving in excess of the speed limit, which was 25mph. Well, he was adamant that not only was he within the speed limit, he was, if anything driving way too slow at around 15-20mph. He explained this to the cop, but nothing doing and he got a ticket.
Well, he said that if he been truly going faster than the speed limit and was caught, he would simply have paid up and put it behind him.
But this time, he knew he was right and decided to contest the ticket in court. Now, things will have to get a little fuzzy here, cause the result went in his favor and he got off. His lawyer knew a thing or two about how speed traps work and how they should work. It seems that a certain item of equipment, shall we say, could not be certified as being reliable because certain, um paperwork could not be produced to verify its accurate calibration on the day in question. Okay, that’s all I’m saying and that’s probably too much!
It just goes to show that justice can be seen to be done for the little guy every so often and this is one of those times!
What this is leading up to, if you were wondering, is something that might be useful to some folks who have a tendency to allow their speed to creep up a little without noticing and find themselves unwittingly above the speed limit just at the time a police speed trap is lying in wait. Now, I do not condone speeding, but I do understand that most honest folks can slip a little once or twice without meaning to and its usually they who get stopped, while habitual speed merchants have an uncanny knack of slowing down just before the radar device hits their car. How do they do that?
Well, I hear that they are cheating by using a radar or GPS device that alerts them to an impending speed trap. Now that is pretty unfair you might say and against the law. But I found out that these devices are actually legal! Can you beat that?
It makes me pretty mad to know that some laws can be gotten around by using them against themselves, unlike that in my friend’s case where a faulty radar device could cost a lot of drivers a lot of tickets and they don’t know any better to contest them. But I guess life was never meant to be all that fair!
Edwyn Prose 