…on the crumbling criminal protections for DUI defendants:

Washington State recently passed a new law, essentially making all breath tests admissible as evidence — regardless of whether the particular breathalyzer was broken, defective, given incorrectly or otherwise inaccurate.

Bear in mind that citizens arrested for DUI are usually charged with two separate criminal offenses: (1) driving under the influence and (2) driving with .08% or greater blood-alcohol concentration. The only evidence of the second charge will be the breath machine. And even in the first charge, the defendant is rebuttably presumed guilty if his or her breath test was .08% or higher. In other words, the entire case pretty much hinges on that machine.

Problem: law enforcement agencies in Washington couldn’t seem to get their acts together in calibrating, maintaining and properly administering the machines. And the legislature just got sick of seeing the courts toss out cases due to questionable breath tests.

So….they simply passed a law saying that a breathalyzer doesn’t really have to be accurate: it is automatically admissible as evidence.

Just add this one to the stack, please.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 9:36 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.