Are Vehicle Crash Photos Admissible Evidence? | Indiana Lawyer Discusses

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Often we take cases to trial involving issues of the admissibility of vehicle crash photos. Photos with little or no damage are often the subject of vigorous debate between the plaintiff's attorney and the defendant's attorney. Photos with little or no damage are something that defense counsel usually want to admit into evidence. Why? They hope that a juror will equate little property damage as inferring that there could be no injury to the occupants. While the conclusion does not logically follow or scientifically follow, they'll still try to get this into evidence. Now we've all seen a situation in which we purchase an egg carton and when we get the eggs at home we open the carton and find that one of them is broken but the carton looks just fine. So the same principle applies in a situation of personal injury and vehicle damage. You really can't draw valid conclusions from property damage photos. As a threshold matter, a court, in order to admit this kind of evidence, has to find that it is relevant. The real issue is can medical injuries be linked to vehicle damage? Unless there's a medical doctor that can link the two together there really is no relevancy to the photographs. The society of automotive engineers have published standards on how to investigate automobile crashes, what conclusions can be drawn from photos, etc. But there are other standards that apply to accident reconstruction cases as well. And medical doctors have a solid background in determining the force dynamics exerted upon a human body during a crash. In any event, even if somehow a defendant establishes the relevancy of a photograph, the court can exclude photographs of this nature as being unfairly prejudicial. Why? Because oftentimes no matter how a jury member might be instructed not to draw any conclusions from such photos they still make go ahead and disobey an order of the court and draw an unfair inference that's not reasonable and shouldn't be drawn. In any event, to handle cases of this type we would suggest that you need an experienced attorney and we've handled this type of issue multiple times over the years.

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