A judgment of the Saarland constitutional court finds first imitators in the jurisprudence. According to this, speed measurements in road traffic can only be judicially used if the measuring devices used store the so-called raw measurement data and thus the result can be checked. However, this is obviously not the case with a majority of the speed cameras used, especially in modern laser devices.
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So judged the district court Berlin-Tiergarten in the case of a motorist, who should have been traveling on a section of the highway instead of the only allowed 60 km / h with 88 km / h: The lack of testing violated "against the rule of law".
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The Berlin public prosecutor's office is currently examining whether it lodges a legal appeal against the judgment of the district court Tiergarten. The Bautzen district court declared in several such cases the result of the measurement as "unusable" and closed the proceedings. Further proceedings, the court told the SPIEGEL on request, are currently deferred to see how the Higher Regional Court of Dresden decides.
Saarland waives numerous fines
The cases from Saarbrücken and Bautzen involved the laser scanner Traffistar S350 from Jenoptik, in the case from Berlin the device LEIVTEC XV3. The Suhl district court evidently also doubts that judicial use of measurements by means of pressure sensors is possible if no raw measurement data is stored and has commissioned an expert opinion. The district court Minden declined, however, to stop such a procedure.
According to a circular issued by the Ministry of the Interior in the Saarland, until further notice no fines are imposed on the basis of measurements with laser and radar devices and devices with pressure sensors. This affects almost all fixed speed cameras. Speed cameras, in which the raw measurement data are already stored - this is the case, in particular, in the case of a flash unit that is usually used for mobile use - are still in use in the Saarland, too.
Some manufacturers do not want to convert devices
The manufacturer Jenoptik is now in the process of retrofitting its Traffistar S350 laser measuring device so that measurement data will be stored in the future. This should be done nationwide. The software update should originally have been finished in July. Now it should be more extensive than originally planned and available by the end of September.
After that, the new software still has to be tested and approved by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. The manufacturer Vitronic (Poliscan) has rejected such a conversion of its equipment so far. LEIVTEC also told SPIEGEL on request that they would wait for further legal developments.
Originally, the Constitutional Court of Saarland had ruled that the basic rights of flashed drivers to a fair trial were violated if the measurement result was not verifiable due to a lack of measurement data. Numerous devices do not store the raw measurement data, but only output basic data, a photo and the speed calculated from the individual measurements of the reflected laser beams.
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