The Calibration Records of the RADAR Gun

August 28, 2000

After my nastygram asking the court to sanction the prosecution for ignoring my repeated requests and motions for discovery that arrived in their office on August 28, this letter was promptly sent back to me, written on the 28th and post-metered on the 29th, sent certified mail. I guess I must have rattled their cage.

Envelope showing meter date of August 29

The "NL 8/30" designation was due to the fact that they sent the letter to my home address, and since I work during the day they were not able to deliver it. My mail carrier attempted to get a delivery signature on the 30th, and noted that with this designation. I had to go down to the post office to pick up the letter a day or two later.

What turned up in this letter was the calibration records I had requested three months before in my informal request for discovery, item number 6. The gun had apparently been recertified since my citation was issued, and so they sent both the applicable certification from before the citation, as well as the one later in the year. Mr. Cho's cover page is shown above, and lays out what's included in the letter, and the actual calibration certificates and test sheets appear below.

This first one was from July 13, so isn't relevant to my case:

(Click on each image for a larger view)

But the next pages in the letter contained the relevant calibration records:

What I find most interesting about these is what's not on them. No tuning fork serial numbers, for example. No initials of the technician who performed the test, no checkmarks, etc. The pages, but for the date and the 100 Hz variation in antenna 2's frequency, could practically be photocopies of one another.

Also, note that the only connection between the department-assigned RADAR gun number written on the citation, and the serial number is a hand-written "#67" in the upper right corner of the page, and not even that on the calibration certificate itself. Naturally, the questions arise: Who wrote that number there? Where is the evidence that it accurately reflects the relationship between the RADAR serial number and the department-assigned number, and that this is the proper calibration record for the "67" written on the citation? These were questions I would have asked in court, if it had come to that point.

Now that I had shaken their tree with my request for court sanction, and finally gotten the calibration records out of them, a number of other requested discovery items would trickle in to my mailbox over the next few weeks. However the next response I would get from them would be a written response to my request for sanctions.

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