What could meteors and personal injury lawsuits have in common? Very simple: Dashcams. On February 15, 2013, a massive meteor crashed into a remote part of Russia. Almost immediately, the internet was flooded with footage of the spectacular event. Much of that footage, believe it or not, came from dashcams installed in cars in the area.
Why do so many Russian vehicles have dashcams installed? As it turns out, drivers in Russia can be just as bad as drivers in Houston traffic. Because of occasional “flaws” in their justice system, many Russians have installed dashcams in their vehicles. In fact, Russians are almost obsessed with these dashcams. They are used to help preserve evidence in the event of an accident, a traffic stop, and apparently – astronomical phenomena!
From the perspective of an auto accident attorney, I actually like the idea of dashcams. Most of the time, auto accident cases are determined by witness testimony or police reports. Interestingly, those police reports are often prepared by police officers who did not even witness the accident. While most police do their best to reconstruct the accident based on the position of the vehicles, skidmarks, witnesses, etc., wouldn’t it be great to have a recording of the accident itself? Not only would such dashcam video help a Plaintiff injured in a personal injury accident, it could also come to the rescue of a Defendant wrongfully accused of causing an accident!
[pullquote3 quotes=”true” align=”center” bgColor=”#000000″ textColor=”#8d1400″]Police dashcam video is routinely introduced in DWI cases in courts all over Texas. The rules of evidence, however, have strict standards for admissibility.[/pullquote3]
In order to insure the greatest chance of having your dashcam video admitted in Court, I would recommend that you do your best to preserve the original SD card (or other memory device) on which the video was recorded. Also, make sure to keep the video unedited and unaltered. While we do not see many dashcam videos in personal injury cases now, I expect such video to become increasingly common in the future. Do you think this is a good or bad thing? Please share your opinion, I’d love to know what you think!
