What's interesting about this is that they sent this on August 15, 14 days after my August 1 letter submitting another copy of the motion for discovery, but well beyond the statutory deadline set forth in Penal Code Section 1054.5(b) of fifteen days from the date of my motion hearing where I handed a copy of my formal motion for discovery to Mr. Martinelli. Clearly, they thought that their statutory clock started ticking when they got my August 1 letter, not at the July 25 hearing. They were dragging tail, and this pattern would continue.
You'll
also note that my case was no longer being handled by Robert Martinelli,
but by Mr. Gabriel Cho, another law-student intern of the DA's office.
This turned out to be a very good thing - in effect, the Commissioner's
warning about the three-point definition of a "local street or road" in
Section
40802(b)(1) of the Vehicle Code may as well have not been given.
The next two pages of the letter contained these photocopies of both sides of the officer's copy of the citation, front side on the left, back on the right, in accordance with item 1 on my motion for discovery. If you click on each image for a closer look, you can see that the paper was flimsy enough that the opposite side of the page showed through on the copier. The front side is essentially identical to my own yellow copy of the citation, but the back side has some interesting details.
The particularly interesting entries running down the right side of the back are as follows:
He also notes that I didn't claim to know what speed I was travelling, and the posted speed of 25mph.RDR # 67 - the SJPD's assigned number of the radar gun used CAL 6-99 - the calibration date of the radar gun, June of 1999 S/V DIR W 1-1 - direction of travel west, in number one out of one lanes RANGE 400 ft - the officer's estimate of the distance at radar observation VISUAL 45 - the officer's visual estimate of my speed
What was particularly useful about this information was the "range" of 400ft. Going back to the scene, I measured off 400 feet from the officer's position, and found that at that distance there were a slew of obstructions such as parked cars, trees, lampposts, etc., that would block, scatter, or refract the radar beam on a typical 6:00pm weekday. Not only that, based on the beam angle of a K-band RADAR gun, the beam at that distance would be over twice the width of the street - about 85 feet.This was going to be a key point in my case, but as it turned out, it never came to that.
Ten days later on August 25, there had been no further word from the District Attorney's office, even though the 15-day deadline in CPC Section 1054.5(b) had long passed. I assumed that this copy of the citation was the last thing that they were going to send, so I drafted a motion for court sanction for failure to comply with discovery and sent it off. It evidently shook their tree a bit.
