We put them on planes and they help us to reconstruct what happened when things go terribly wrong. So it makes sense that black boxes would start appearing in automobiles; it fits thematically with the trend toward digitally memorializing all testimonial information in order to assure accurate reconstruction of disputed events.

Tell that to the New York teenagers involved in a fatal traffic accident when their cars raced through a red light and rammed a jeep, killing its two passengers. The drivers told police they were traveling 50-55mph at the time of the accident. What they didn’t realize was that one of the cars — a late model Corvette — carried an Event Data Recorder (EDR) and it dutifully reported an actual speed of 139mph. Oops. When that data became available, prosecutors upped the charges to murder.

The implications are enormous and while civil libertarians everywhere decry the intrusions into our privacy, the government is ratcheting up requirements to have these on board all new automobiles. Meanwhile, all tech-savvy defense lawyers should be gearing up their challenges to the onboard software that these devices are using to turn their automobiles into silent witnesses. The first thing I’d do with a case like that is demand to see the software code that is tattling on my client. How reliable is this? Is it science? Has it attained an established acceptance in the scientific community? Or is this just the latest form of junk science?

Should be very interesting stories ahead.

Read the story here.

RP

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 8:35 am and is filed under Software, Hardware, News, Junk Science, You Won't Believe This. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.