by Dan Kennedy
In Ohio, where I live part-time, the state’s Supreme Court has just upheld a traffic court conviction for speeding based solely on the cop’s eyeball guess of the driver’s speed, now institutionalizing a change in law. Radar guns are no longer needed. Officers are now encouraged to issue speeding tickets based only on their opinion of how fast the car is moving. If it looks like you’re going too fast, by as little as one MPH, that’s good enough. You are guilty.
It’s easy to discredit this. Ask a cop to guess the speed of a passing red Corvette, dull gray mini-van, and UPS delivery van that are, in reality all carefully going precisely the same speed, what would you like to bet he pegs the red sports car as going faster than the mini-van or UPS truck? Of course, if he happens to be a racist, he might just think a car driven by a black guy is going faster than a car driven by a white guy.
