A New York Times article by Stacey Cowley and Jessica Silver-Greenberg confirms what Massachusetts OUI lawyers and defenses attorneys everywhere have been arguing for years, that breath test machine are often inaccurate and unreliable. \u00a0The Times found that\u00a0these machines, a \u201clinchpin of the criminal justice system,\u201d are, at best, unreliable. In its investigation, The New York Times found evidence that the machines\u2019 internal code was flawed, creating rounding errors that pushed results over the legal limit \u2013 0.08 or higher. Further, the machines are required to be calibrated; often, this never happened. In some cases, calibration records were completely faked.<\/p>\n
Defective Design = Reasonable Doubt: Experts in Washington find numerous problems with breath test machines and results<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n At least one manufacturer \u2013 Dr\u00e4ger, a German company \u2013 has repeatedly blocked efforts to review their software code as well as any reports regarding the machines. A judge in Washington granted a request from defense lawyers to have the code evaluated by an outside expert. Robert Walker and Falcon Momot, described as \u201cveteran programmers and security experts,\u201d wrote a report titled, \u201cDefective Design = Reasonable Doubt.\u201d They shared the report with defense attorneys at a conference. But Dr\u00e4ger demanded that the report be destroyed by them as well as anyone with a copy. The New York Times was able to obtain a copy that had escaped destruction; it stated that Dr\u00e4ger\u2019s Alcotest 9510 machine was \u201cnot a sophisticated scientific measurement instrument\u201d and that it did \u201cnot adhere to even basic standards of measurement.\u201d Instead, the machine rounded up at least some of the results. Further, these machines did not account for the temperature of the person\u2019s breath. Samples above 93.2 degrees (as most breath samples are) often cause inaccurately high readings. This is because Washington opted not to pay the extra money for a sensor that would measure breath temperature and allow the machine\u2019s software to account for it. Washington was not alone. \u00a0Massachusetts has not paid for the additional feature to account for breath temperature, only the State of Alabama has this added feature for enhanced accuracy of results.<\/p>\n