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Yesterday I attended a traffic court in York region.

The process went as you would expect, the prosecutor called each defendant one by one and offered a plea deal and nearly all of them accepted the deal and pleaded guilty.

Near the end of the day the prosecutor asked for a recess to setup some videos and during this time they played dash cam videos of cruisers recording drivers who failed to stop at the stop sign and got pulled over.

As these were played, the rest of the people who were there also accepted a plea deal and cases were closed, so no one actually went through the motions of an actual trial with an officer testifying etc.

Now, what I found rather odd/interesting is that, they never played any of the videos to the end when the driver is actually pulled over.

Furthermore, why offer a reduced charge when you have a bullet proof evidence? It just puzzles me, but that is not my question...

So my question is, has anyone actually seen someone or themselves pleaded not guilty forcing persecution to play the video in court as evidence?

The only comment I have is that the pulling over part of the video has nothing to do with the charge of not stopping at the stop sign, which is why they would not need to play it all the thru.

Observer135 wrote:Now, what I found rather odd/interesting is that, they never played any of the videos to the end when the driver is actually pulled over.

Furthermore, why offer a reduced charge when you have a bullet proof evidence? It just puzzles me, but that is not my question...

So my question is, has anyone actually seen someone or themselves pleaded not guilty forcing persecution to play the video in court as evidence?

It's very infrequent since most defendants don't bother forcing a trial if they feel there's relatively definitive evidence of the offence. The very few times I've seen defendants force a trial when there's video evidence involved people who felt there was a justification for their actions.

As for why the Crown still offers plea deals even when video evidence exists, it's simply a matter of time and resources. The Crown and Courts simply don't have the resources to run a trial for every defendant. Even the most straightforward trial takes 15-20 minutes whereas a plea deal takes about 2. Also many jurisdictions schedule trials on days that the officers are working, so they'd rather not have the police tied up in Court all day waiting to give testimony.

Stanton wrote:

It's very infrequent since most defendants don't bother forcing a trial if they feel there's relatively definitive evidence of the offence. The very few times I've seen defendants force a trial when there's video evidence involved people who felt there was a justification for their actions.

OK, thank you both for your comments.

But I am not clear on what Stanton is implying by "it is infrequent", are you saying that you have seen these videos used as evidence during a trial?

Yes, when defendants have gone to trial.

Stanton wrote:Yes, when defendants have gone to trial.

Thank you for clarifying.

Followup question: have you ever seen a defendant win the case with a video evidence being presented?

Observer135 wrote:Followup question: have you ever seen a defendant win the case with a video evidence being presented?

The short answer is no, but that doesn't mean that a ticket is unbeatable.