More than a million Americans get arrested for DUI cases every year. The scene is almost the same every time. You see flashing blue lights following your car and asking you to stop in the middle of the night. Two police officers come out with a small machine and ask you to blow in it. A reading pops up, and before you know it, there are handcuffs on you. The reason? You were drinking and driving. However, according to the New York Times, these alcohol breath tests are often unreliable.
The devices that the police use to check if you are indeed drinking and driving or not generate skewed results. In fact, they detect more innocents than the ones who actually drink and drive. Even though the manufacturers of these devices claim that their breathalyzers work accurately to the third decimal point, the reports contradict their loud mouth statements.
Judges in New Jersey and Massachusetts threw out over 30,000 breath tests in the last year. That goes to show how inefficient these devices are. The lax in governmental oversight and human errors with the machines can almost land anyone in jail. In fact, there are thousands of other tests that the government invalidated in the last few years because they didn’t provide accurate results.
The experts believe that there are massive issues in the calibration of these devices that lead to inappropriate test reports. They tend to increase the result by as much as 40%. That’s the reason why even innocent people have to go through a lot of harassment if they get arrested. Many technical experts also tried using these devices. They think that there are severe programming errors in the software of these machines. Many states already stopped using these devices because they couldn’t come up with any conclusive evidence because they don’t have an accurate tool to test DUI convicts.
So it is important to get a DUI lawyer after getting accused of driving under the influence.
SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/business/drunk-driving-breathalyzer.html
