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Guilty?Of Being Average

By Lawrence Taylor

One of the greatest sources of error in breath-alcohol testing is the consistently recurring fallacy that the individual tested is perfectly average in certain critical physiological traits. Put another way, obtaining an accurate blood-alcohol reading in a DUI case is completely dependent on the validity of a number of assumptions. Unfortunately for the person being tested, these assumptions are usually incorrect: The person tested is rarely 'average' in even one of these critical characteristics, let alone in all of them. For example, all breath testing devices depend on the assumption that the ratio between alcohol in the exhaled breath and alcohol in the blood is 1 to 2100. In fact, the machine is designed to produce a reading based on that assumption; the accuracy of the reading is directly dependent upon the accuracy of the presumption...continue to full post

Full post as published by DUI Blog on November 29, 2009 (boomark / email).