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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: 4, Interesting) by hwertz on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:15PM (1 child)
Iowa took care of this years ago -- although I'm assuming the lawyers got rid of it over the years. They passed a law saying one could not challenge a breathalyzer based on the police failing to calibrate it!
I'd just like to note -- one of the reasons the limit USED to be 0.12 was because they knew darn well these machines weren't that accurate .. the original limit was high enough the person was DEFINITELY drunk, even accounting for generous margins of error of the machine.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @01:35AM
Citation needed. Not only can you challenge any evidence of any crime in court, any less being a violation of due process, but Iowa has a website specifically designed to assist people who want to challenge their BAC results: https://breathalcohol.iowa.gov/ [iowa.gov] The only thing even close to what you said is that you cannot subsequently challenge a refusal to take a breath or urine test after the two hour spoliation window closes.