§ 72.055.Admissibility of Visual Depictions of Collision

An evidentiary provision resolving a recurring dispute about crash photographs.

A court may not require expert testimony for admission into evidence of a photograph or video of a vehicle or object involved in a collision — except as necessary to authenticate it.

Subsection (b): once properly authenticated under the rules of evidence, such a photograph or video is presumed admissible, even if it tends to support or refute an assertion regarding the severity of damages or injury.

The final clause is the point of the section. The dispute it addresses is over photographs showing minor vehicle damage in a case claiming serious injury. A defendant offers them to suggest the impact was slight; a claimant objects that inferring injury severity from sheet metal requires biomechanical expertise, and that the jury will draw the inference without it.

The section resolves that in favour of admission. The images come in, the argument about what they show is made to the jury, and expert testimony is a matter of proof rather than a precondition.

It cuts both ways — the presumption applies to a photograph that supports a severity claim as well as one that refutes it. A claimant offering images of a destroyed vehicle benefits equally.

"Video" is defined broadly in the subchapter's definitions, covering images with or without audio however captured or stored — which reaches dashcams and telematics footage.