In 2012, Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, faced a $400 fine for allegedly running a stop sign. Instead of accepting the fine, Krioukov crafted an academic paper titled "The Proof of Innocence" to argue his case in court.
Surprisingly, the judge was convinced and acquitted him. Krioukov shared his paper online with a subtitle, "A way to fight your traffic tickets," humorously noting that the paper earned a special prize of $400, which he didn't have to pay to California.
The paper discusses a scenario in which if a car stops at a stop sign, an observer (e.g., a police officer) located at a specific distance perpendicular to the car's trajectory might perceive the car as not stopping under specific conditions. These conditions are:
1 - The observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car.
2 - The car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively quickly.
3 - There is a short-time obstruction of the observer's view of the car by an external object (e.g., another car) at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign.
Disclaimer: the paper was submitted on April 1st, 2012, so there's a non-zero probability this could a be joke by Dmitri :) Either way, it's a good paper."
Note that in the USA, civil lawsuits are determined based on the standard "preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt". That is, "P(guilty | data) > 0.5" instead of "P(guilty | data) > 0.999".
Note also that the Fermat's Library copy is version 1 of the paper; it was subsequently updated and version 2 is available on arXiv.