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NYT: Alcohol Breath Tests Are Often Unreliable - Don't Trust Them.

Posted by William Young | Nov 11, 2019 | 0 Comments

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Alcohol Breath Tests Are Often Unreliable - Don't Trust Them.

"Alcohol breath tests, a linchpin of the criminal justice system, are often unreliable, a 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.

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.

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.

The Times interviewed more than 100 lawyers, scientists, executives and police officers and reviewed tens of thousands of pages of court records, corporate filings, confidential emails and contracts. Together, they reveal the depth of a nationwide problem that has attracted only sporadic attention.

The consequences of the legal system's reliance on these tests are far-reaching. People are wrongfully convicted based on dubious evidence. Hundreds were never notified that their cases were built on faulty tests."

Take a read here: https://nyti.ms/2JLfLZh.

This is a really great article that explains exactly what defense attorney's have been arguing for years - Breath tests are skewed to make people look guilty who may not be.

About the Author

William Young

William Young - Idaho Criminal Defense and Trial Attorney As a criminal defense attorney I have handled nearly every type of case - from simple infractions to the most complex felonies. There is no case to small for my attention, and no case too large for me to handle. I fight for my clients a...

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