Originally Posted by
Digital_Cowboy
That must of have taken some leg work on their part.
Not an overwhelming amount of work, and it was a felony case (as this MI one is, I'm sure). They enlisted the help of a local car dealership on the make/model/year/color match (IIRC, it was a color-keyed mirror).
I'm guessing that the defense lawyer tried to argue that the mirror came from another vehicle and that comparing the brake marks wasn't an accurate way to identify the vehicle. . .
The driver was seen, drinking, at a restaurant a couple of blocks from the scene just minutes before the crash. And if the defense had claimed it was a different car, the prosecution would have called an "expert witness" to testify that the odds against there being another mirror broken off in a way that fit exactly as it did are overwhelming, more than the number of that model of car that were produced. It was as substantive a piece of material evidence as a ballistics match.