I previously blogged here about the situation in Washington, DC, in which it had been brought to light that hundreds of people had been convicted of DUI in that city based on breath test results that are now known to be inaccurate. A story today in the Washington Post reports that the city has determined that 400 people were falsely convicted and 200 of them actually were imprisoned, for at least 5 days, based on these false results. The police admit that their technician adjusted the machines’ to increase the subject’s breath test by about 20%. All 10 of the city’s machines were flawed.
The DUI laws everywhere, including Kansas DUI laws, make it illegal to drive with a .08 alcohol concentration. Alcohol concentration means grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath. We are talking about microscopic amounts of alcohol, think .08 (eight one-hundreths) of a gram, to be over the legal limit. A 20% false inflation is huge. It can make the difference between being under the legal limit or over it. Apparently, Washington, DC, like Kansas, also makes penalties harsher for blowing over a higher legal limit. In Kansas, if you blow over a .15, it can make the difference between losing your license for only 30 days, or losing it for one year. So, a first time offender that blows a .149 only has his license suspended for 30 days under Kansas DUI laws, but if he blows .150, one-thousandth of a gram higher, he loses it for one year, followed by one year of only driving with an ignition interlock device. So, accuracy in these machines can make a drastic difference in whether a person gets convicted or not, goes to jail or not, and/or loses his or her license or not.
For the people in Washington, DC, whose lives have already been disrupted by convictions, jail time, heavy fines and driver’s license suspensions, I am sure it is little consolation for the city police to come back now and say, “Oops, we were wrong about that. Sorry.” No doubt there will be lawsuits and attempts to address these false convictions, but it is too late to give people the time they spent in jail back, the days they couldn’t drive back, or the jobs that they already lost back. Washington, DC, has apparently tightened regulations controlling the accuracy of the machines in the wake of this scandal. Did you know that on March 14, 2008, the Kansas Department of Health & Environment, the agency in charge of ensuring the accuracy and scientific standards for breath testing in Kansas, watered down all of their regulations to require far, far less out of police officers and police departments to ensure the accuracy of breath test machines? The regulations they had before were already a joke, but now it has become nothing less than a sham. It may take a similar situation as that in DC for Kansas DUI law to change to require that minimal scientific standards be applied to the breath tests in our state. Until then, we cannot trust the alleged breath test results that are putting people in jail and taking away their driver’s licenses on a daily basis.