This story is kind of old news, but I am just getting around to discussing it. In July of 2008 the Ohio Inspector General released a report revealing his findings after an investigation into a cheating scandal in which Ohio law enforcement officers, including high ranking sergeants of the Highway Patrol were caught cheating on the recertification test for the state’s breath testing machine. Each year in Ohio police officers have to take a short test to make sure that they have the minimum knowledge and training to be administering breath tests. The test is extremely easy to pass. However, a group was caught using a cheat sheet during the test. In fact, the cheating was so rampant that it was well known among the law enforcement community. You should really check this story out because it is pretty scary. There is a link to the Inspector General’s report.
The story is significant, not because it says anything about police officers in general (they are human, too), but because it exposes an ugly truth about the “science” of DUI. Kansas DUI cases are all about the so-called science. Driving behaviors are said to carry statistical significance, field sobriety tests are said to be scientifically validated to determine impairment, and the breath test machine is based on all sorts of scientific principles including infrared spectroscopy, Henry’s Law, human partition ratio, etc. The area of Drug Recognition Evaluation (DRE) is all based on medical diagnosis using blood pressure, pupil size, skin and muscle quality and the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN) test. The science is not all it is cracked up to be in the first place but, in addition, occasionally there is cheating.
The problem is, of course, that police officers are not scientists and they are not hired to make medical diagnoses. Yet, they are expected to employ all of these techniques out on the street. Entire DUI cases rise and fall on the findings, opinions, training and experience of Kansas DUI officers. A person can be convicted solely because of what number a machine spits out (the Intoxilyzer 8000 in Kansas). Who is looking to see if they have received the proper training, are employing the latest technology, and employing it properly? Kansas DUI defense attorneys had better be.
Kansas DUI officers don’t even have to take a test to get recertified each year on the breath test machine. All they have to do is run a couple of tests in front of another officer or someone from the Kansas Dept. of Health and Environment without screwing it up. It is not too difficult. In fact, the regulations concerning quality control of the breath test devices used in Kansas are laughably unscientific and minimal. Yet, our law firm has uncovered cheating and document falsification in a local law enforcement agency concerning the accuracy of a breath test machine even very recently. It resulted in a lot of breath tests being thrown out. This may not be the norm, but it does happen.
People are arrested and convicted every day in Kansas for DUI. They lose their driving privileges, they lose their freedom, they lose their jobs and they live the rest of their lives as a convicted criminal. It is hard to have any confidence in those harsh results being justified if the science is being rigged or there has been cheating for certification. Every case demands scrutiny. Every certification requires verfication. A good Kansas DUI attorney has to flip over every single rock and look underneath it to determine whether the science is being fudged, or the paperwork is out of order, or there are any other suspicious issues that might undermine confidence in the case. This egregious episode from Ohio is just a reminder why every case needs serious attention and serious investigation. The best Kansas DUI attorneys do it in every case, every time.