24174: Joseph (pub): Haitian couple killed in Long Island car crash? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dotie Joseph <dotiej@hotmail.com>

Although I'm not entirely sure, but the victims' names (Sophia Bretous and
Jean Desir) sound pretty Haitian to me.

CAR’S ‘BLACK BOX’ EVIDENCE ADMITTED
Prosecution Will Use Recording Device to Dispute Driver’s Statement After
Fatal Crash

BY MARK HANSEN

Interviewed at a hospital after a three-car collision that left two people
dead, Blake Slade, who was driving one of the vehicles, told a detective he
had been going about 50 or 55 mph at the time of the accident.

The detective expressed disbelief, according to court records, because he
had already heard from several eyewitnesses that 19-year-old Slade and a
friend driving another car were speeding side-by-side down a two-lane
highway at approximately 100 mph before the collision in June 2002. But
Slade told the detective, "There were no cops there to judge my speed."

True enough, but for Slade and his friend, Kyle Soukup, then 17, there was
another disputing "witness." Soukup’s 2002 Chevrolet Corvette was equipped
with a "black box," a computer module that, among other things, records a
vehicle’s speed in the last five seconds before its airbags deploy in a
collision.

Earlier this month, Judge Alan Honorof of New York’s trial-level Supreme
Court in Nassau County on Long Island, ruled that evidence gleaned from the
Corvette’s black box, which recorded the vehicle’s speed at 139 mph four
seconds before the fatal accident, can be used in the upcoming second-degree
murder trial of the two men.


Because the technology is still relatively new, experts say, data from a
car’s black box (known formally as an event data recorder) has been used as
evidence in only a handful of court cases around the country. But in the
not-too-distant future, they predict, it will become as commonplace in
courtrooms as tire-mark and vehicle-crush-damage evidence.

"It’s a rising wave," says Thomas Bohan, a lawyer and forensic physicist in
Portland, Maine, who specializes in accident reconstruction. "And every
month, there’s going to be more of it than the month before."

Slade and Soukup are each charged with two counts of second-degree murder in
the deaths of a Long Island couple, Sophia Bretous, 23, and her 31-year-old
fiancé, Jean Desir. Police say they were killed when Desir, the driver,
tried to turn left in front of the two oncoming cars. Their 1993 Jeep
Cherokee was first broadsided by the Corvette, which tore the vehicle in
half. A split second later, Slade, driving a 2002 Mercedes-Benz, rammed into
the front half of the Jeep, knocking it 300 yards up the road.

The defendants’ lawyers challenged the admissibility of the black-box
evidence on the grounds that it was scientifically unreliable. They also
moved to suppress the evidence because it had been obtained through an
unlawful search and seizure. (Police had removed the black box from Soukup’s
wrecked car without a search warrant. They later applied for and received a
search warrant based on information they had obtained before they removed
the device.)

At a hearing in September, William "Rusty" Haight, an accident
reconstruction expert with more than 23 years of experience, testified for
the prosecution on the reliability and general acceptance of black-box
technology within the scientific community.

Haight said black-box technology has been used by the aviation industry
since the 1940s. The same type of recording technology also is used on
cruise ships, cargo ships and trains, he said. Haight testified that he has
performed more than 200 crash tests comparing black-box data in cars with
objective external instrumentation, and has found the data to be extremely
reliable.

In a Jan. 6 ruling, based largely on Haight’s testimony, Judge Honorof found
the black-box evidence to be "generally accepted as reliable in the
scientific community," and therefore admissible. He also ruled that,
although police obtained the black-box data through an illegal search, the
evidence was still admissible under the "independent source doctrine." The
doctrine, Honorof explained, permits the introduction of otherwise tainted
evidence if it was obtained independently in the course of lawful activities
untainted by the initial illegality.

Honorof noted that courts in at least five states, including Florida,
Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and New York, have allowed black-box evidence
to be used at trial.

Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Michael Walsh, the lead prosecutor
in the case, says the black-box data will be used to corroborate the
testimony of eyewitnesses and accident reconstruction experts.

Soukup’s lawyer, Jack Litman of New York City, said he was too busy to
discuss the decision. Slade’s lawyer, Ronald Bekoff of Garden City, couldn’t
be reached for comment.

Barbara Bernstein, executive director of the Nassau County chapter of the
New York Civil Liberties Union, says she has no problem with the use of
black-box technology as long as the owners of vehicles equipped with the
devices are made aware of their installation.

"It’s like having a police officer sitting in the backseat of your car," she
says.

A California law that took effect in 2004 requires manufacturers of vehicles
equipped with black-box technology to disclose that fact in the owner’s
manual. And Haight and Bohan say most, if not all, manufacturers of cars
equipped with black boxes already volunteer that information.



©2005 ABA Journal