Physicist Dmitri Krioukov was pulled over for running a stop sign. He got out of the ticket with a paper, The Proof of Innocence, which included the above graphs. Physics Central explains:
If you look at the graph on the right, you'll notice three lines with different colors, and each line corresponds to a different deceleration at the stop sign. The blue line with the biggest spikes represents a 10 m/s^2 deceleration — about the highest deceleration for the kind of car he was driving. This line mimics what actually happened best according to Krioukov because he had a terrible cold that day, and one sneaky sneeze caused him to slam on the brakes hard as he approached the stop sign.
The crux of Krioukov's argument is that this rapid, legal deceleration can appear very similar to the case described in the graph on the left. But the left graph actually represents a car cruising through the stop sign at a constant velocity exceeding 20 miles per hour. So surely an officer would still be able to tell the difference, right? Not when another car partially obstructs his view, according to Krioukov. When another car partially blocked the officer's view of Krioukov's car momentarily, the officer could have missed the brief yet crucial timing of his stop.
