Police throw out all speeding tickets from past 13 months

Decision comes after court rules that cameras aren’t accurate enough to count as legal evidence

The Israel Police on Tuesday announced it will be canceling all speeding tickets from the past 13 months, since June 2018, after a year of legal wrangling over the reliability of the national speed-camera system.

The announcement should come as welcome news to tens of thousands of motorists who were caught speeding by the cameras.

However, all tickets given from Tuesday by means of the speed cameras will be enforced.

The Acre Magistrate’s Court ruled last year that the cameras may not be accurate enough to count as legal evidence of a traffic infraction, rendering the hundreds of nationwide cameras essentially useless.

Many hearings and multiple tests later, the courts gave police authorization to begin using the cameras again — but the status of camera evidence in the intervening 13 months remains legally unclear.

Police and state prosecutors therefore concluded that they would toss out all tickets given during that period, and begin full enforcement from Tuesday.

A police spokesman said that while no changes or improvements have been made to the cameras, law enforcement has “added new layers of evidence-gathering,” suggesting that they will corroborate the camera evidence with other findings when presenting traffic violations to courts.