Pacing with Another Vehicle

Pacing basically means that the officer followed you with another vehicle, attempting to maintain a constant distance and referring to his speedometer to gauge your speed. In this case, the calibration of the police car is vital to your defense. The defense strategies outlined earlier may not all apply, since the officer does not have to be specifically trained in reading a speedometer and it is unlikely he was following the wrong vehicle. Your best bet is that the officer does not appear in court and that the prosecution fails to prove all the points in the specific section of the vehicle code. Review the cross examination sections that we have discussed earlier and also the radar ticket cross examinations. These questions should get you thinking on the right track so you can arrange the questions for the motor pacing case. Some of the more important items for you to remember are the following:

Make sure the officer is giving recollection of the incident and not reading directly from the back of the citation.

Make sure that the officer testifies that the unit was calibrated at a certain date, and that the calibration certificate is present in court. Also, the qualifications of the technician that calibrated the unit should be available. Review the officer’s testimony and the prosecutor’s line of questioning as thoroughly as possible. If they leave out any of the points covered in the vehicle code, you have grounds for a motion to dismiss. Don’t expect that this will just happen automatically, as the judge may allow the prosecution to reopen their case if they happen to omit something. Ask the officer a bunch of questions concerning the other traffic on the road. Ask him if during the time he was pacing you, he passed other vehicles. If not, that would indicate that you were traveling at the same speed as the other vehicles at that time of day on that piece of road.

Ask the officer as to the exact distances covered from the time the officer began to pace the speed of your vehicle until you were stopped. You would also want to know the estimated distance between the two vehicles at all times. Review the math and see if the officer actually had to speed up in order to close the distance between your vehicles before pulling you over. It’s possible he could have used the accelerated speed as the basis for the ticket.