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Attorney General Finds Widespread Breathalyzer Inaccuracies; Police Shut Down All Machines

By Lawrence Taylor

If you are accused of DUI or DWI, a reading results in a legal presumption of guilt; if charged with driving with a blood-alcohol content of .08% or higher, the machine is the only evidence of blood-alcohol.  In essence, either way you will be facing a "trial by machine". So how good are these machines?  Good enough to constitute "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"?  Or are they just "close enough for government work"? As regular readers know, one of my pet peeves is the unreliability and inaccuracy of breathalyzers (or, more accurately, any of the various breath testing models sold by a handful of manufacturers).  See, for example, Breath Alcohol Testing: "State of the Art?, Why Breathalyzers Don’t Measure Alcohol and Report: Breathalyzers Outdated, Unstable, Unreliable...continue to full post

Full post as published by DUI Blog on February 09, 2011 (boomark / email).