Can You Challenge Radar Gun Evidence in Court?

When a law enforcement officer gives you a speeding ticket based on “clocking” your speed with a radar gun, you may think you might as well admit your guilt and pay the ticket. Most people believe that radar gun evidence is incontrovertible. This, however, is not always the case.

FindLaw explains that sometimes radar guns fail to work the way their manufacturers intended them to. When this happens, the officer using the gun usually is at fault in some way.

For instance, every radar device comes with specific guidelines for calibrating it. In most instances, manufacturers recommend that the officer not only calibrate his or her gun before every use, but also that (s)he use a special tuning fork to perform the calibration. You and your attorney need to know when the officer did, in fact, calibrate his or her device and what (s)he used to do so. If you can establish delayed or improper calibration on the part of the officer, you can legitimately challenge the evidence in court.

Another possible ground for a challenge rests on how much training the officer received in the use of his or her radar device. Virtually all radar gun manufacturers recommend that officers go through an approved and certified training program. If your officer failed to receive this training, (s)he may have misused or incorrectly used the radar gun.

Bottom line, if you honestly believe that you were not speeding when the officer says you were, your best interests dictate that you and your attorney obtain both the calibration records and the officer’s training records. Either or both could give you the reasonable doubt you need to get yourself acquitted of speeding or even possibly get the charges dropped.