A new tool has become available for law enforcement to catch speeders (and who knows that other applications to come): laser guns. Although the guns have limitations (e.g., the requirement of a direct line of sight, making them less useful in bad weather), they make it far easier to target an individual automobile, making up […]
From the antipolygraph.org blog comes this story about 2 United States citizens of Pakistani descent being denied re-entry into the United States because of their refusal to submit to a polygraph examination. I find it amazing that this quackery remains a mainstay of law enforcement, particularly on something as important as terrorism investigation. Given how […]
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 […]
I’ve been waiting to see signs of this and, after seeing airline security alert levels raised today, the stories are starting to emerge. Here’s a story about a technology that uses video cameras to scan luggage for suspicious items by monitoring the electromagnetic energy given off by different objects. So explosives can be theoretically be […]
I’ve been in jury trial these last few days but I’ve got some free time now. This morning my jury came back with their verdict. There were many issues in the case, but one point I drove home in cross examination and final argument was that, of the five police cars that pulled up to […]
I reported here recently about a Washington state case in which a court had ordered National Patent to turn over the software source code used in their Datamaster EPROM. I spoke to Jon Fox, a prominent Seattle area DUI lawyer handling the case, and he told me that the company actually surprised him and everyone […]
As I reported here regarding a recent Florida case, the quest to obtain the software code behind the curtain of most breath test machines has started to pick up steam. In the Florida case, the deadline for turning over the code passed yesterday, and no code materialized. Accordingly, the defense is moving for sanctions today, […]
Nationally recognized DUI guru Lawrence Taylor has one of the best blogs on the net focused on DUIs. I make The DUI Blog a standard stop on my daily tour through the blogosphere. One of the recurring themes you’ll find there is the inherent unreliability of the Breathalyzer machine regularly used by police to “confirm” […]
I’ve been meaning to get a tablet PC for some time, but my need is very specific: I want the lightest possible device that will really feel like a paper notepad when I’m in court. The convertible tablet PC’s I’ve seen haven’t excited me, mostly because they wind up having to pack so much into […]
A family friend is Commander of Operations for the Issaquah Police Department and he has graciously allowed me to attend some of his department’s nightly police briefings and go on ride-alongs with some of his officers. It’s always a fascinating experience, and I never know what to expect when I go. On a recent night […]