Mʏᴇʀs & Cᴏᴍᴘᴀɴʏ
Tickets and Physics
A lot of people think that if they got a ticket they can’t recover for their personal injuries. Fortunately that’s not the case.
Police can and do make mistakes. The evidence rules acknowledge this fact of life. The fact that someone received, didn’t receive or even paid a ticket can’t be used in a civil personal injury case.
We represented a man that was involved in a multivehicle accident while entering the Mercer Tunnel. He got a ticket for speed too fast for conditions. That never came into evidence.
But that wasn't the end of the story. We needed to establish that he was hit from behind before he hit the vehicle in front of him.
We hired an accident reconstructionist right away and proved that our client was hit from behind before he hit the car in front of him.
All of this was based on some interesting calculations about points of impact. It's easy to think about vehicles being very planar. But when there's heavy braking, the front of the vehicle really dips. As a result--even if there isn't an EDR--you can find out a lot about the pitch of the vehicle based on these measurements and infer what inputs the vehicle was receiving.
After we explained to the insurance companies what the physical evidence showed and meant, we recovered policy limits from both the following driver and under the client’s UIM policy. Despite getting a ticket the client walked away from the collision a couple of hundred thousand dollars to the good.
Two claps in this case for not only Washington law that excludes evidence of a citation but even more for how some simple measurements and physics can explain what really happened in a collision.