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DUI Defendant Wins Source Code to Breathalyzer
MyrddinBach writes "CNet's Police Blotter column looks into a Minnesota drunk driving defendant case with a twist. The defendant says he needs the source code to the Intoxilyzer 5000EN to fight the charges in court. Apparently the company has agreed to turn over the code to the defense. 'A judge granted the defendant's request, but Michael Campion, Minnesota's commissioner in charge of public safety, opposed it. Minnesota quickly asked an appeals court to intervene, which it declined to do. Then the state appealed a second time. What became central to the dispute was whether the source code was owned by the state or CMI, the maker of the Intoxilyzer.'"
..has nothing to do with this case, and little to do with who holds the copyright. What if he does find flaws, and others have already been convicted using output from the same machine? Suddenly, all those past cases come back up.
I guess the lesson here is: the source should already have been public and heavily scrutinized. I don't want my government spending my tax money and wasting time in court, to get convictions based on evidence from mysterious unaudited machines. Why? Because sooner or later, some defendant is going to want the mystery peeled back. Some defendant is eventually going to want a fair trial. Might as well give that fair trial to the first one, so that a bunch of expensive shit doesn't have to get re-done (or so that a bunch of guilty people don't end up walking free, simply because the cops used a defective machine that ended up collecting untrustworthy "evidence").
Keep mysteries out of court, from the start. Don't let a big list of convictions that depend on them, build up. The chances of the device being defective are probably pretty low, but you know there's gotta be some prosecutors with pits in their stomachs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A low-carb diet (e.g. Atkins diet) can indeed make you "ketotic" and raise your breath acetone level.
e vels_produce_inaccurate_Breathalyzer_results
From your college chemistry course acetone has a C=O bond, while alcohol is a C-OH bond.
Cheap breathalyzers will use a chemical reaction to detect the alcohol in your breath -- often potassium dichromate (these are the ones that go from red to green with alcohol).
More advanced models (such as the ones the police would use, would use essentially spectroscopy to try to measure the resonant absorbance of the C-OH bond. This would not be fooled by acetone, which has a much different absorbance of the C=O (approximately 1700 cm-1 IIRC). There are also variants of this method.
If you are ever innocent and accused, get a blood test, which really is a quantitative direct measurement and can be confirmed, with very little chance of being fooled.
If you are not innocent, **IN THEORY** the easiest way to lower your reading is to silently hyperventilate prior to blowing. This would prevent equilibration of the alcohol in your bloodstream with the air in your lungs that you just breathed in and out. It is far from perfect, and I would strongly advise to never drive drunk, nor rely on this method.
Additional references: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Could_elevated_ketone_l
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
America has some problems, but I don' think we're to the point yet where they can arrest you on "suspicion of drunk driving" then use that to "forcibly take a blood sample".
n sent.html.
Yes, that is close to the reality.
In the case of drunk driving, most states have adopted the law that if you are driving a vehicle, you have then given consent to submit to the approved test to find out if you're driving under the influence of alcohol. When you are stopped and you're not sure of what your alcohol level is, you cannot refuse to take a breathalyzer test. As soon as you got your drivers license, you gave consent in advance to do this. If you refuse, you will find yourself in bigger trouble than you would have by submitting to the test. This implied consent is automatic in the case of anyone who drives a vehicle. From: http://www.lawcore.com/dui-dwi/what-is-implied-co
So, you've agreed to it in advance by having a driver's license. You get to pick your poison in terms of what kind of test it is.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
First of all, you need to cite some sort of source for a statement like that. (A review by Fell and Voas reports that reducing the legal limit from 0.10 to 0.08 reduced alcohol-related crashes, injuries, and fatalities by between 5% and 16% in the United States; they report further statistically significant reductions in fatalities in jurisdictions that have moved to a limit of 0.05.)
Second - as other posters have noted - how prepared are you to deal with a surprise abnormal condition?
Third, nice weasel word--below any 'significant' level of impairment? What does that mean?
Fourth, I should hope that the limit would be below the level of significant impairment under any condition. There's no compelling reason why anyone should have to drive with any alcohol in their blood; any limit ought sensibly to include a margin of safety.
~Idarubicin