AFL star Jason Akermanis loses three-year battle over speeding charge
Former AFL star Jason Akermanis has lost a nearly three-year legal battle to overturn a conviction for exceeding the speed limit by more than 40km/h.
Akermanis’ Toyota Kluger was detected travelling at 141km/h in a 100 zone on May 22, 2022 at Mutdapilly southwest of Brisbane
A magistrate later convicted and fined the Brownlow medallist and Brisbane Lions triple premiership player $1500 following a hearing that lasted most of a day.
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Akermanis had claimed the officer who detected his speeding did not correctly operate his LiDAR equipment, which fires a laser beam at objects and measures the time taken for the reflected beam to return.
Justices Debra Mullins, Susan Brown and Thomas Bradley on Friday published their written reasons for denying Akermanis leave to appeal.
“The (magistrate’s) finding that the LiDAR accurately recorded the speed within a small margin of error was not a matter of speculation,” the justices said in their reasons.
“There was positive evidence that the officer had operated the Lidar correctly.”
A senior designer for the company that manufactured the LiDAR device was called by the prosecution to give evidence in the District Court appeal.
The justices noted the witness had supported the police officer’s claim that he accurately measured Akermanis’ vehicle speed and the equipment was not affected by weather conditions.
The justices said Akermanis had himself provided evidence to the District Court that supported the fact that he had been speeding.
“He had accepted when he looked down at his speedometer after he had seen the police and slowed down it recorded he was doing 115kph,” the justices stated.
“Relevantly at the time that the officer pointed the speed camera at the applicant’s car, he was overtaking two other cars.”
The justices refused Akermanis leave to appeal as he had not shown any arguable error in the decision of the District Court, let alone that a substantial injustice had been caused.
