When Your Car Testifies Against You - Ep. 5.344

hello welcome once again to Latos law I'm Steve lay til the question is could your car be called in to testify against you in a court of law yes this is what we're coming to right now here's an article written by marina med vain' who's an attorney writes about interesting matters involving the modern technology in the law and because I saw the word car in the story and of course David sent the article thank you very much but odds are your vehicle is equipped as an event data recorder also known as a black box or a vehicle black box and your local police department is now fully equipped to retrieve and analyze the black box data and use it against you in court and people immediately think wait isn't this a violation of some constitutional right I have because the Fifth Amendment says I don't have to testify against myself you know I can take the fifth can I take the fifth on behalf of my car no you can't as of May 2018 almost all common US vehicles come standard with the black box and that means it every time you get behind the wheel every button you press and every maneuver you make is being recorded at least the important ones the data is stored in the Box to be readily accessible after collisions and it tells you things such as whether your seatbelts are on how you use your brakes if at all turn signal usage travel speed and so on and the information can be retrieved and then it will either of course support or contradict your account of what happened if you're lucky your story is bolstered and if not of course your credibility is shot if you want to remain silent and limit the evidence the government can use against you know criminal prosecution you're out of luck because you can remain silent but the black box doesn't have to be and here's the thing and I and I've had several people ask me about this issue and I say you know it's unfortunate but the government can also for instance retrieve your phone records right which would you rather have the max you know let him have an access to the phone records or the black box in your car but these are just devices these are these are mechanical things that's not you you're given rights under the Constitution to keep you from testifying but they're getting data off of some other objects those are not you that's the obvious big distinction here um these things are also popping up now in lawsuits because as you can imagine for instance two cars hit at an intersection and the one car says you know I I slammed on my brakes a second I saw this guy ran the red light except the black box shows that they didn't slam on their brakes you know that kind of thing you'll recall a few years ago there was a whole spate of runaway vehicles with UNAC 10th unintended acceleration a few years ago where people claimed that they had their foot firmly on the brake and the car was just zooming down the road and as anyone will tell you who knows anything about cars you can stand on the brakes in a car and the car won't go anywhere and what's happened in many of those cases is the person had a foot in the wrong pedal and you know as a cop trot along behind them saying hit your brakes the person's like I am I am and the brake lights aren't on so some other brakes are failing the brake lights are failing and then of course once they managed to stop the car and the cop walks over and hits the brakes brake lights come on the brakes work yeah it wasn't a defective brake it was a defective foot attached to somebody misusing something this all began in the 1990s with the black boxes as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began to gather statistical data originally just for their own use but police have now begun using black boxes in criminal cases there was a deadly collision in Georgia and Victor Mobley was charged with two counts of vehicular homicide reckless driving and speeding he is accused of driving at 97 miles per hour in a 45 mile-per-hour zone as he collided with another moving vehicle and both passengers in that vehicle were killed police obtained data from Mosley's black box without a warrant the data included airbag deployment engine speed brake status throttle position engine revolutions drivers seat belt status and brake switch status as well as time from maximum deceleration to impact time from vehicle impact airbag deployment and diagnostic information on the vehicles systems it probably also calculated the amount of o2 in the exhaust the prosecutor relied on mobiles black box data to prove the government's case against Mobley who was then eventually found guilty on all counts well we appeal this case the court of appeals Georgia arguing that he had an expectation of privacy in his vehicles black box data that the Fourth Amendment shielded this data from police search and seizure without a warrant so of course there's that issue also so the first issue like I said it's testifying against you but it ain't you the second of all the data that's in there do you have an expectation of privacy with respect to it the data was not private the court reasoned any member of the public can observe a vehicle speed or see whether the driver is wearing a seatbelt this is not the type of information is guarded by the Fourth Amendment the court reasoned but the court limited its ruling to this particular set of facts acknowledging that is technological capabilities of vehicles black boxes broadened so too must protections for the informations they will store and you know it's an interesting point because what they're saying is the black box recorded a bunch of data and the data it was recording was something that somebody could have just stood there and watched and seen happen oh the guys sailing by up the guy stomped on his brakes up the guy slammed into something now the person watching wouldn't have the accuracy of all the metrics being taken by that black box from the cars own sensors but that information is not private in the sense of like what you're texting to your girlfriend or boyfriend or both and it's it's not the kind of privacy yet that you might expect to have inside your house with the curtains drawn and the lights off okay so you know you're driving the car in public and how you're driving the car can be observed by somebody else so really what expectation of privacy might there be now I can see this evolving over time I can see them saying you know something the amount of data being gathered by the black box is so extensive that it's going to cross over into that area but as you can imagine it's not that hard for the police to go get a warrant and just say hey we had a case where there was a severe accident somebody died there's a wrecked vehicle sitting there and we need to preserve the evidence because we think that black black box is going to explain away what happened and by the way keep in mind the black box will exonerate you if you and did what you think you did and the black box shows that you did what you think you did right so imagine if you're on a jury and two cars collide into each other out in the middle of nowhere and their only Witnesses are the people in the two cars okay you and you're in that jury it's a nightmare until somebody goes oh we've recovered the black boxes from both cars we can tell you which car didn't hits brakes we can tell you how fast each car was going we can tell you which systems were activated we can tell you who wasn't wearing a seatbelt that kind of thing suddenly it's like oh we don't even want these people to testify now I'd rather just have the black boxes give us the information we'll figure it out from there and remember that many people think that the Constitution and the legal system and your rights are designed to not just protect you but to help you get away with something right the fifth amendment is so that you don't have to testify against yourself because if you did that it probably hurt you but likewise courts are actually there in an attempt to get to the truth of the matter wouldn't most people agree that if we could wave a magic wand and say from this point forward every court ruling will be correct every Court ruling be correct meaning that the people who are liable will be found liable the people who are guilty we found guilty people who didn't do it we found not guilty wouldn't that be good and now you know the problem of course is is that people who are guilty or who are liable don't wanna be found liable or guilty so in advance I would think the black box stuff is good but I can see where somebody's out drinking and driving and wakes up in the hospital and they say by the way the reason that you're handcuffed to your bed is because you killed a bunch of people and you're trying to remember what happened and you have no idea that black box is gonna explain a lot of stuff that you forgot okay and I think that's a good thing at least in that setting in a similar case in Florida happen a year earlier after a high-speed collision that killed his passenger charles Worsham was charged with manslaughter and vehicular homicide the black box and wars vehicle recorded speed and braking data the cars changed in velocity steering input yaw rate angular rate these are all things that sound like airplane terms but I know a little bit more about them because I studied how they did the aerodynamic Studies on the wind cars safety belt status system voltage and airbag warning lamp information police obtained the black box data without a warrant and attempted to use it in their case against the driver now worship argued that he had an expectation of privacy in his vehicles black box data and remember this is Florida so it's a different state and that the police should be prohibited from using the information against and when they obtain it without a warrant the Florida Court of Appeals agreed and ruled in direct contrast to the Georgia case that the Florida Court understood the black box as a type of constant unrelenting surveillance they also considered the difficulty expertise and precision required to obtain and interpret the data stored in the black box and that's the thing the information contained in the vehicles black box is fairly difficult to obtain and again this is from marina madmen and the data retrieval kit necessary to extract it is expensive moreover each car manufacturers data recorder requires a different type of cable to connect to the diagnostic port plus the downloaded data must have me interpreted by a specialist with extensive training so we're getting conflicting opinions from different courts and of course that's to me another problem somewhere down the road I suspect they'll have uniform rulings on this but it might take it going all the way to the US Supreme Court if you have different rulings already out of different states and so you know that's the thing I've actually people asked me they say Steven curious I bought a brand new car can I disable the black box can i and the problem is and there's gonna be guys in the audience and gals need to know this better than I do and if you do know the answer this question please pipe in and tell me but I'm assuming that the same data being stored by the black box is also the same data that's being used by all the various engine control devices and modules and computers so that for instance you know it monitors your speed but it probably also uses some of that data too work with the transmission for instance or to work with the fuel injection of the exhaust or some of these things might interplay and my curiosity is is the black box legitimately a simple recording device that sits over here and records data is that what it is or is it integral to the system such that the information it's storing and using is being processed such a way that it has to go back into the car system somehow and again I don't know I know obvious and airplanes my understanding is that a black box literally just sits someplace and records data flight data recorder and it might record all of the cockpit communications it'll record communications from the plane to the ground or other planes and then a record flight airplane systems data are the engines running you know what how fast is the plane flying what's the altitude things of that nature and my understanding is that simply a data dump the data is being dumped into that the question is is the black box and a car the exact same thing where the literally just dumping data there were theoretically if you were to just connect it the car could still operate I don't know I don't know and the problem I always have is nowadays doing anything with the electronics on your car you are rolling the dice my friend because who knows who knows and I don't know it might vary from manufacturer to manufacturer or vendor to vendor I don't know but it's the kind of thing where I can see if you tampered with the electronics in the car tried to disconnect something and something goes haywire in your car bring it back to the dealership and see what they think because they're gonna go oh no wonder it's not working right somebody sliced the wires to the black box and you can say all you want about I don't think the black box does anything but record data there you know somehow you messed with the system and you caused bad things to happen so that's a situation right now and like I said your vehicle black box could be a witness against you in court I'll put a link the article by marina met medve n-- it's a great article she's got a lot more in there I just simply traced over the tip of the iceberg but it's like I said an interesting question but yes your car can be brought into court to testify against figuratively speaking a better hypothetical to me is this let's suppose some are down the road we advance in our technological understanding of science and and the interplay between humans and animals and animals and computers and humans and computers what if we got to the point where we could read minds not just the people but of animals and so one day you're at home and something happens in your house and your dog witnesses it could they bring your dog into court and have your dog testify against you not literally on the stand raise your paw and bark out an answer but suppose they could retrieve the data off your dog's brain and say well here is what your dog saw okay I have a sneaky feeling that that is when you'd have people racing to Congress racing to Washington DC saying we need to amend our Constitution right now and include in fourth and fifth amendment that it's unreasonable search and seizure for you to invade the brain space of my dog or cat and or the fifth amendment my dog or cat cannot be made to testify against me I gotta get some kind of privilege the same way I do with my with my spouse okay so like I said that's more of a thought experiment whether it'll actually happen or not I don't know but questions your comments put them below otherwise talk together you

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 34,396

Rating: 4.9375443 out of 5

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com

Id: m2sm20QLqwE

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019