Central New York Injury Lawyer Blog

As a recipient of more than a few speeding tickets within the last few decades, I took an interest in this NY Times article about a $58,000.00 speeding ticket in Finland.

The offender was clocked at 64 miles per hour in a 50 mile per hour zone. Doing the math, that works out to $4,143.00 for every mile per hour above the limit.

Why so high? What determined the high price was not so much the offense as the offender. The speedster was a multimillionaire in one of the few countries in the world where fines for traffic infractions are calculated based in large part on your income. The mindset in this Scandinavian country is that the sting of the fine should be felt equally by rich and poor. The sting of a $100 fine is felt by the street sweeper but not by the banking tycoon. Thus, in Finland Fine-land the government calculates your fine based on half your daily net income multiplied by the number of days of income you should lose according to the gravity of the offense. This particular $58,000 ticket represented a half-a-day’s income of the wealthy offender.

This is not easy to stomach. Not for you. Not for your teenager. But watch it. And then make sure your teenager watches it. The driver of the car in the photo was texting and did not see the tractor trailor stop to turn left. The video below is very graphic. Don’t text and drive!

video of texting while driving accident

Keep safe!

Did you see the recent article in the Syracuse Post Standard about weather-related motor vehicle death statistics? Statistics can be pretty boring. But I found this pretty interesting.

The new study shows that SNOW, SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN cause more than 800 vehicle-related deaths each year in the U.S. And one of the highest snow-related death areas was – you guessed it – Upstate New York’s “snow belt”. Hey, if Syracuse basketball can’t be number 1, at least Syracuse is number 1 at something . . . 🙂

Lake effect snow is literally deadly. Not surprisingly, the intensity of snowfall correlated strongly with the number of vehicle deaths. Also not surprisingly, New York City has a much lower rate of snow-related motor vehicle deaths than Upstate. Onondaga County and Oswego Counties had the highest rates in the state.

Let’s say you get into a car accident in New York State and it was the other guy’s fault. But when the police officer shows up and “investigates” he determines it was your fault. And he says so in his accident report. You sue the at-fault driver for your injuries. Can the cop’s police report come into evidence against you? Can the cop testify it was your fault?

The answer generally is, no and no. Why not? The conclusions in his report that it was your fault are “hearsay”. Further, it’s for the jury to determine whose fault it was based on the evidence. Letting the cop testify about whose fault it was would unduly influence the jury. The cop can testify only about the evidence he found at the scene, for example skid marks, the damage to the cars. He can also generally testify about what the PARTIES said to him, but not about what non-party witnesses said to him. That would be hearsay, too. Those witnesses must be brought into court to tell the jury what they saw and must be subject to cross-examination. The cop can’t tell the jury what they said because then the right of the parties to cross-examine those witnesses would be lost.

Some of these concepts were explored in the recent case of Watch v. Gertsen. In that case, the cop determined, after talking to the participants in the accident, that two motorcyclists who collided into the back of a car were at fault for following too closely. In the personal injury trial, the trial judge let the cop testify about his conclusions in the report. The jury’s verdict aligned with the cop’s conclusions. But the appellate court reversed, finding that it was error to allow the police officer to testify about fault from the accident report. And rightly so. What good is a jury trial if a cop is allowed to say whose fault it was? That’s the job of the jury, not the cop.