Police Blotter: GPS used to fight speeding ticket

 

An Ohio man is trying to beat a speeding ticket through an unusual defense: claiming that his cell phone's GPS records show he was driving under the speed limit.
Jason Barnes received two points on his license and a $35 fine for allegedly driving 84 mph in a 65 mph portion of Interstate 75 in March 2009. But he says that his employer uses GPS tracking on his Verizon Wireless phone to detect speed limit violations--and those logs prove he wasn't speeding.

So far, Barnes hasn't had much luck. An Ohio appeals court ruled last Monday that there was not enough evidence about how Verizon Wireless GPS alerts worked to toss out the speeding ticket.
"We find that the credible evidence clearly supports the trial court's judgment that Barnes was traveling in excess of 65 miles per hour on Interstate 75," Judge Stephen Shaw wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel. "We cannot find that the trial court, acting as the factfinder in this case, clearly lost its way and created such a manifest miscarriage of justice that the conviction must be reversed."
The panel gave more weight to the prosecution's evidence, which included police in an Ohio State Highway Patrol airplane saying they calculated how fast Barnes was driving (no radar gun was used). Barnes claims the logs showed he was traveling at 50 mph, saying the relatively slow speed was because of heavy truck traffic on I-75 at the time.
"Barnes presented no evidence from a person with personal knowledge regarding how the GPS calculates speed, whether there is any type of calibration of the equipment used to detect speed, whether the methods employed by his particular company to detect speed are scientifically reliable, or the accuracy of the GPS' speed detection," the panel said.
It's possible, in other words, that the case could have turned out differently if Barnes had hired an attorney and taken additional steps to demonstrate how Verizon Wireless' GPS tracking worked.
That's happened before. In 2007, an Australian man successfully used GPS data downloaded from his car to show that he was traveling at or below the speed limit. The speeding ticket was eventually thrown out, as was one in England.

credit:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001248-38.html