His findings were startling.

After consuming almost any type of bread product — white loaf bread, donuts, pretzels, pastries, etc. — Price consistently registered blood-alcohol readings on the machine. These levels were commonly around .03%, but rose as high as .05% (enough, along with a drink or two, to reach illegal levels). Further, the Intoxilyzer’s slope detector (an electrical circuit designed to detect alcohol from the mouth rather than from the lungs) failed to indicate the presence of any “mouth alcohol”. He reported this in an article entitled “Intoxilyzer: A Bread Testing Device?”, 15(4)Drinking/Driving Law Letter 52.

Reacting to the use of this article by defense attorneys in their state, the Washington State Toxicology Laboratory conducted their own studies to refute the findings — this time with the machine used in Washington, a DataMaster. Unfortunately, their research only confimed Price’s experience.

As reported in Logan and Distefano, “Ethanol Content of Various Foods and Soft Drinks and their Potential for Interference with a Breath-Alcohol Test”, 22 Journal of Analytical Toxicology 18 (1998), a variety of breads and soft drinks were tested and found to contain no alcohol. Alcohol-free subjects then ingested these products and provided breath samples into a DataMaster. The law enforcement researchers’ conclusions:

We found that, particularly at low concentrations but as high as 0.046g/210L, mouth alcohol rather than expiratory breath alcohol may be reported as apparent true breath alcohol…

In other words, alcohol-free subjects who consumed bread or soft drinks were causing the machines to read up to .05% blood alcohol concentrations (readings are rounded off to closest 1/100th percentile). Furthermore, the slope detection system failed to screen the effects of mouth alcohol from that of alcohol coming from the lungs:

It is evident from these results that the slope detector feature was unable to distinguish mouth-alcohol concentrations at these very low levels.

What caused bread to register on breath machines as alcohol? The theory of the state lab’s experts:

Most baked products with listed contents indicating they contained yeast did in fact have some alcohol present. Alcohol is produced by the fermentation process in yeasts by their action on simple sugars used in preparing the dough….Although most of the alcohol in the dough is lost during the baking process, some is evidently retained in the matrix of the bread…

Parenthetically, there exists additional scientific literature reporting intoxication in animals eating dough and sourdough. Suter, “Presumed Ethanol Intoxication in Sheep Dogs Fed Uncooked Pizza Dough”, 69(1) Australian Veterinary Journal 20 (1990); Thrall, et al., “Ethanol Toxicosis Secondary to Sourdough Ingestion in a Dog”, 184(12) Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association 1513 (1984).

The effects of bread on breathalyzers is not just an interesting anecdote. The significance of these findings should be apparent. First, bread dough tends to stick between the teeth and remain there for extended periods of time, later to be breathed into a breathalyzer; it also absorbs alcohol while between the teeth. Second, although it is not illegal to drive with a .04% blood alcohol level,adding one or two drinks to the bread reading could raise that above the illegal .08% level.

 You should expect to pay more in large metro areas than in small towns in rural areas. You should expect to pay more for a second offense than a first. You should expect to pay more for a felony DUI than for a misdemeanor. With that in mind, you will find a wide range of fees.

Typically, the top DUI lawyers charge more than new lawyers, or lawyers with lesser skills or reputations. However, there are some good DUI attorneys charging less than some terrible ones. For this reason, price alone should not be your main criteria when selecting an attorney to represent you. As a general rule, when it comes to legal representation, you should not expect anything for free.

A DUI lawyer in private practice will probably not agree to take your case pro bono (for free), even if you have a good case, and even if you shouldn’t have been charged with the offense in the first place. The best way to get a feel for attorneys’ fees in your area is to call around and get several quotes. When the economy is good, many lawyers try to charge as much as possible for each client. When the economy is poor, there are often “bottom-feeder” lawyers who charge insanely low prices for defending DUI cases (say less than $2,000.00 for the whole case) with the idea of getting a high volume of business and driving better lawyers out of business. These “bargain” lawyers typically take on way too many cases to be effective in any of them and often times leave their clients wondering whether they would have been better off with a public defender.

If you want an excellent DUI lawyer (and you should), expect to pay for it. Expect to pay between $4,000.00 and $10,000.00 or more depending on the location, the facts and complexity of the case, your criminal history and other factors. High quality DUI lawyers charge substantial amounts of money to put their expertise and skills to work for you. They often times don’t make any more money than the “bargain” or “bottom-feeder” lawyers, because excellent DUI lawyers are excellent because they view their profession as a calling and accept far fewer cases so they can do the best possible job for each and every client.

Money isn’t always the only determining factor of whether you will be able to hire the best DUI lawyer in your area. The truly excellent DUI lawyers get plenty of referrals and don’t have to beg or bargain for cases. Some will assess you to see if your expectations are realistic and if you personality will be a pleasant one for them to work with. (As an aside, “bargain” lawyers don’t care about their clients’ personalities because typically they plead them guilty at the first possibile opportunity and therefore don’t have to spend much time with them anyways.) Top DUI lawyers spend a LOT of time with their clients and earn their fees.

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And what that machine says is pretty much the end of it. There will be no second tests. There will be no cross-examination of the machine. Are these machines so reliable and accurate that we have permitted them to become judge and jury?

Scientists universally recognize an inherent error in breath analysis, generally of plus or minus .01%. That means that if everything is working perfectly (an unlikely scenario), a .13% breathalyzer test result can be anywhere from .12% to .14%.This has been acknowledged by courts across the country (see, for example, People v. Campos, 138 Cal.Rptr. 366 (California); Haynes v. Department of Public Safety, 865 P.2d 753 (Alaska); State v. Boehmer, 613 P.2d 916 (Hawaii), recognizing an even larger .0165% inherent error).

What does that tell us about the accuracy of these breathalyzers? Well, let’s take a test result of .10%. Taking inherent error into consideration — and assuming the machine was working perfectly, the officer administers the test correctly, and the suspect’s physiology is normal and perfectly average — the true BAC could be anywhere from .09% to .11%. In other words, the true BAC can be 10% in either direction — or, put another way, anywhere within a 20% margin of error.

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Minneapolis, MN.  May 1 –Minnesota may be forced to drop thousands of driving-while-impaired cases and change the way it prosecutes others in the wake of a state Supreme Court ruling Thursday, prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed.

The state’s highest court ruled that defendants in drunken-driving cases have the right to make prosecutors turn over the computer “source code” that runs the Intoxilyzer breath-testing device to determine whether the device’s results are reliable.

But there’s a problem: Prosecutors can’t turn over the code because they don’t have it.

The Kentucky company that makes the Intoxilyzer says the code is a trade secret and has refused to release it, thus complicating DWI prosecutions…

The Intoxilyzer 5000EN is the standard device used by Minnesota police to determine if a driver is impaired. The state bought 260 of the machines from the manufacturer, CMI of Kentucky, in 1997, and state law presumes the devices’ results to be reliable.

The device is used with nearly eight of every 10 suspected drunken drivers who are tested in Minnesota.

But defense attorneys have argued that if they can’t examine the source code, the computer program that runs the machine, they have no way to tell if the Intoxilyzer is reliable. District judges across Minnesota have handled defense requests for the source code with a patchwork of rulings: Some say a defendant has a right to examine it; others say it isn’t relevant…

The Supreme Court said (defendant Brunner’s evidence) “show that an analysis of the source code may reveal deficiencies that could challenge the reliability of the Intoxilyzer and, in turn, would relate to Brunner’s guilt or innocence.”

 

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There are many different kinds of “breathalyzers” or breath testing devices. The first of the modern breath testers, manufactured by Smith and Wesson many years ago was called the Breathalyzer.

When I was a young prosecutor we used to call the Smith and Wesson 900A the “Dial-a-Drunk” because the machine’s dial was able to be manipulated by the operator.

Since then, various manufacturers have recognized the growing market and come out with their own models, bearing such names as Intoxilyzer, Intoximeter, DataMaster, AlcoSensor, Alcotest and so on; most of these products have been produced in different model versions, such as the Intoxilyer 4011, 5000 and 8000.

To deal with the confusion, the term “breathalyzer” came to be used as a generic term for any breath testing instrument.

Most of these are evidentiary machines — that is, larger machines generally kept at the police station whose test results are used in evidence. Others are smaller, handheld units carried by officers in the field; generally called PBTs (preliminary breath tests) or PAS (preliminary alcohol screedning). These are less accurate and are usually used as a field sobriety test to help determine whether to arrest a suspect.

The original Breathalyzer operated using a wet chemical method of analysis, employing a disposable glass ampoule of chemicals. Although still occasionally found in law enforcement, this relatively primitive technology was replaced in later machines by infrared spectroscopy, gas chromatography or, mainly in handheld units, fuel cell analysis; a couple of the more recent machines use a combination of infrared and fuel cell.

Here is a great website explaining how these different types of machines work:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/breathalyzer.htm

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