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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 Runaway1956 on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:18PM (1 child)
Just do an internet search, use my terms "people fail sobriety tests when sober" or similar.
Each and every one of those little tests appear to be easy, and simple. But, individually, each of those tests has a "trick" to it. That is, the test proves to be mildly challenging for most people, sober or not. Medical conditions, mental conditions, emotional conditions (including the stress of being pulled over) and more affect how well you can perform the test.
The state, in it's beneficience, doesn't declare you to be sober after passing one mildly challenging test, instead, subjecting you to three, five, or maybe even more tests. Individually, you may pass any one of those tests, but collectively, you're going to stumble somewhere.
The cop is looking for an arrest. The tests are judged subjectively by the cop. Your odds of passing whichever collection of tests he throws at you are rather slim.
If you have to submit to a breathalyzer test, then do so. But never consent to a roadside sobriety test. They are complete and utter bullshit. At least the breathalyzer has some science behind it.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 05 2019, @05:27PM
Since I don't drink, I would ask for a blood test if it is at all possible.
Meanwhile, I can tell you the alphabet forward and backward, and the Hebrew alphabet forward. (don't ask, in 2015 I thought I would try something different than learning another programming language.)
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.