Appellate Justice Daniel R. Shoemaker
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A memorial service will be held today in San Francisco for former Presiding 1st District Appellate Court Justice Daniel R. Shoemaker, whose 1968 ruling upheld police use of radar to detect speeders. He was 85.
Shoemaker, first appointed to the bench in 1943, died Sept. 16 at a retirement center in Marin County, a spokesman for UC Berkeley’s Hastings College of the Law said this week.
After serving on the Municipal Court in San Francisco from 1943 to 1947 and the Superior Court from 1947 to 1960, Shoemaker was named presiding justice of the 1st District in San Francisco in 1963. He served in that post until he retired in 1971.
In his September, 1968, ruling, Shoemaker upheld police use of radar on the streets and highways because it had become “an electronic device which scientifically and accurately measures speed of a moving object.”
Earlier, the use of radar, perfected during World War II, had been challenged at various court levels as haphazard and unreliable.
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