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from the take-a-deep-breath-before-reading dept.
These Machines Can Put You in Jail. Don't Trust Them.
A million Americans a year are arrested for drunken driving, and most stops begin the same way: flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror, then a battery of tests that might include standing on one foot or reciting the alphabet.
What matters most, though, happens next. By the side of the road or at the police station, the drivers blow into a miniature science lab that estimates the concentration of alcohol in their blood. If the level is 0.08 or higher, they are all but certain to be convicted of a crime.
But those tests — a bedrock of the criminal justice system — are often unreliable, a New York Times investigation found. The devices, found in virtually every police station in America, generate skewed results with alarming frequency, even though they are marketed as precise to the third decimal place.
Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years.
The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, and in many cases they haven't been properly calibrated, yielding results that were at times 40 percent too high. Maintaining machines is up to police departments that sometimes have shoddy standards and lack expertise. In some cities, lab officials have used stale or home-brewed chemical solutions that warped results. In Massachusetts, officers used a machine with rats nesting inside.
[...] Technical experts have found serious programming mistakes in the machines' software. States have picked devices that their own experts didn't trust and have disabled safeguards meant to ensure the tests' accuracy.
[...] Yet the tests have become all but unavoidable. Every state punishes drivers who refuse to take one when ordered by a police officer.
I strongly suggest reading the entire article. Breath-taking and sobering is an understatement.
Also at CNET
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:14PM (7 children)
Yeah, and this assumes that the method they use to measure your BAC in the first place is accurate if the thing is properly calibrated, which it really isn't.
Hey, I've got this crazy idea -- maybe instead of testing somebody's breath, let's test their blood to determine something called their "Blood Alcohol Content."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:26PM
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:29PM
BAC really means "Bank Account Content". The machine is an ATM for the city/state
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 05 2019, @07:13PM
We "played" with blow test BAC analyzers at a party once. Takeaway lesson: NEVER EVER blow into one of those things immediately after taking a drink - the evaporating alcohol in your trachea and mouth will destroy your legality.
Or, if you want the Banzai defense: do pop a capsule of grain alcohol between your teeth just before blowing, the reading it produces will indicate that you are clinically dead and preserved.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday November 05 2019, @09:26PM (3 children)
Which states provide you the option of a blood test instead of a breath test?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 05 2019, @10:04PM
Most, but you usually have to pay for it.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday November 05 2019, @11:01PM
"Not enough" is the answer I would assume.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday November 06 2019, @02:31AM
Where I live (don't know about other states) the breath test is a screening test - blow positive and you get a blood test (which you don't need to take, but a refusal is deemed an admission of guilt).
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.