Brian Wilson of Livonia, Michigan certainly wasn’t picking up any good vibrations when he saw the unwelcome flash of police car lights behind him as he drove to nursing school. Still, as most would, Wilson pulled over and began talking with the officer once he came over to the car.
“I asked the officer why he pulled me over and where [he had caught me violating a traffic law],” Wilson recalled.
The answer to the “why” was simple enough: speeding. But the “where” question (and a disc golf-honed sense of distances) would turn out to be Wilson’s saving grace. While the officer said he had clocked Wilson speeding at a point that seemed to Wilson to be around 400 feet (121 meters) away from where the officer had been parked, the ticket stated an official distance of 798 feet (243 meters). Wilson thought he could use this discrepancy to his advantage.
Used to checking the distance of his crushes with UDisc’s “Measure Throw” feature, it was a no-brainer for Wilson to use it to investigate his suspicions concerning distance in this matter. Returning to the spot of his ticket at a later time, Wilson fired up the app and “started where the cop was parked and walked to the exact point of the place he said [Wilson] was laser targeted.”
“It read 380ish [115 meters],” Wilson said. “So I then walked to 795 feet and took multiple pics there. I used both distances and where the officer was parked as start points…I took screenshots of various distances, printed it, and showed it to a judge. I made my case based on the fact the officer was mistaken or the equipment was faulty, using UDisc as the tool to show the actual distance being accurate to within +/- 11 feet.”
Though proving that the officer had misinformed him didn’t convince the judge to void the ticket, Wilson did initially* avoid getting points on his license, “apparently for creativity.”
*Wilson later appealed to have the entire ticket thrown out. Instead of receiving a reduced sentence, he was given one point he had previously avoided. Sometimes you gotta lay up.
