aardvark wrote:stevew_zzr wrote: The prosecution had *no* evidence you were going any particular speed above the speed limit, so any offences related to excess speed should have been dropped.
Well, not really. The argument was probably that he was travelling in excess of 45 km/h above the speed limit. Once you start reaching those kinds of speeds, the actual final speed is kind of irrelavant.
From memory, the cops tailed Ninja to an intersection, watched him slow down at it, make the turn and accelerate out of sight along the cross-street. They followed, caught up to him, hit the discos and pulled him over for doing 180-odd *along the cross street*.
So, not only was the GPX250 supposed to be able to exceed 180kph, it was supposed to have gone from 30kph (the sort of speed at which you'd take a turn at an intersection) to over 180kph in a few hundred metres.
Which is why I suggested, months ago, that, along with putting his bike on a dyno, Ninja take the bike to an EC drag night, get himself filmed to show he's giving the bike all it's got and enter that into evidence alongside timeslips showing the bike to be capable of no more than 16s quarters with a terminal speed in the region of 120-130kph...
...at which point his lawyer, if he was anything other than a complete liability to his client, would get up, and cross-examine the cop to the effect of,
"How much time, would you say, elapsed between you observing the motorcycle make the turn into the cross street and you doing the same?"
What's the cop going to say? "About 10 seconds."
"So, when you made the turn, how far ahead of you would you say the motorcycle was?"
Two options here. If he says "Oh, about 500m", the lawyer can further examine the cop's claim that he can accurately determine the speed of a receding motorcycle from some 500m away, at night.
Alternately, if he says, "About 80-100m," out come the dragstrip timeslips which show that the 300-foot time of a GPX250 on full throttle is about 7 seconds, at which point its speed is some 90kph.
"Can you explain to us how you came to judge the motorcycle's speed to be not only over 30kph greater than even its theoretical top speed, but more than *twice* the speed this motorcycle can possibly reach in the time and distance available?"
There were so many holes to be shot in the cops' case here it's not funny.
I can't believe:
a) Ninja isn't appealing to the District Court.
b) His lawyer was apparently more incompetent than the guy out of
The Castle.
