DC: Bogus Breathalyzer Results May Go Back a Decade

[sofa king]

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/33/3361.asp

Motorists in Washington, DC may have been falsely accused of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) for more than a decade as a result of faulty "Intoxilyzer" breath testing equipment. Whistleblower Ilmar Paegle, a veteran police officer now working as a contract employee for the District Department of Transportation, argued in a memorandum to the city's attorney general that the breath testing machines have not been properly calibrated since 2000, as first reported by WTTG-TV.

...

"You too could have been pulled over on the basis of a minor traffic violation and put through a series of difficult and humiliating field sobriety tests," DC-based defense attorney Jamison Koehler wrote on his law firm's blog. "After blowing into the breath test machine, you could have spent the night in a jail cell with other people who were drunk, angry, disorderly, mentally ill or whose sweating, panting and retching signaled to you that they going through drug withdrawal. You could have had to shell out thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and missed work on so many occasions to attend court hearings that your employer warned you might be fired.... On the basis of the faulty breath test results, you too have been convicted of driving while intoxicated even with blood alcohol levels far below the legal limit."

__________________

And, in fact, I personally witnessed just that thing happen. I recall the friend I was with being pulled over for driving with his lights out down 17th Street (easy to do because the street is so brightly lit), being told to park the car on the side of the road, and then being carted off to the station after a rudimentary test while I was left to walk home to Arlington, 10 miles away. By the time I got home around 4 hours later, my friend was home, with his car and a fresh new DWI. It had taken them less than two hours to process him, make him blow into one of those broken breathalyzers, and then they gave him his keys back and told him to go home. Naturally, he chose to drive instead of take a cab, though he was told not to. Nobody checked to see if he actually drove again, his car was not impounded, nor was he held. It was like they knew the whole thing was crap.

My friend always maintained that there was no way he was over the limit, but whether he was or not was never an issue because all DC wanted was a shitload of money. Once he ponied enough up, the charges were completely dropped, which I also thought was strange. Over the years I saw dozens of people beat the rap simply by hiring an expensive lawyer and throwing thousands of dollars at the problem. Those who didn't got nailed.

At the time, I never listened to protests of innocence among my hard-drinking friends, even though I myself had given up drinking and driving in the '90s and was actually very observant about it. There are too many incidents to describe in detail, but here are some commonalities I see:

* Most of my friends were drinking some on the night they were picked up. Many of them argued that they had not had enough to count as over the line. I'm sure some will want to point out that having some alcohol before driving is also a stupid idea, but it wasn't against the law, which is the point here.

* Outsiders were targeted. I have plenty of friends who live in Washington and have cars with DC tags. They simply don't get pulled over like Virginia and Maryland drivers do.

* Money made the problem go right away. Whatever the city had on the driver, no matter how many times that person had been picked up previously, or what that person's record was in his or her home state, a few thousand dollars properly applied made the problem go away. In many cases, the money made sure that the driver's home state was never informed of the incident.

* The arrest procedure was all about processing, not about keeping drunk drivers off the road. DC police never bothered to boot or impound the vehicles of drunk drivers. Instead, they'd leave the cars parked (sometimes illegally) where they were and tell the driver to come pick them up "later." Once processed, drunk drivers were routinely released with their keys, while they were still supposed to be drunk, with the expectation that they would also find a way to soberly remove their illegally parked cars.

All that adds up to a decade-long money making scheme, that would have required the active participation of basically the entire DC criminal justice system. The scheme intentionally held the future reputations of thousands of drivers hostage in return for money, without valid evidence to support the charges.

Those of you out there who have burned by this, I hope go after them mercilessly. I don't know if it's possible, but if it is, have the judge expunge the incident from your arrest record. I have heard that modern employers search an applicant's arrest record, exactly because the courts like to hide convictions in return for cold, hard cash, but the original charge stays with you forever as an arrest. Good luck.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. Any good attorney always challenged the calibration issue, and won.

I worked in the substance abuse treatment field since 1987.
the issue of accuracy and especially calibration of the breathalyzers was well known.
Equally well known was the defense ( for those who could afford an attorney and could NOT afford
a DUI record), said defense being making the arresting police dept PROVE that it had indeed calibrated
the analyzers within the recommended time frame, by the recommended methodology, by the recommended technicians, etc.
99% of the time, the police could not do so.

Of course, most of the folks who could not afford a good defense attorney paid out of pocket, got the DUI on record, paid again for higher insurance premiums, etc.