I think the third condition is the one that may have set the judge over on the side of "not guilty." After all, if you lose sight of the defendant vehicle's path, how can you say he did or did not stop? Personally, I don't think this was so much arguing the physics as much as it was "muddying the waters" and relying on the idea that another vehicle had obstructed the officers view of the defendants car in the stop sign. Nonetheless, it is something of an "interesting read." The other interesting thing here is to compare the way the author of the online news account describes the defense with what the professor wrote in his paper.We show that if a car stops at a stop sign, and observer, e.g., a police officer, located at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop, if the following three conditions are satisfied: (1) the observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (two) the car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (three) there is a short-time obstruction of the observer’s view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign.
Can anyone spot the flaw (mentioned in the news article)?