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Breathalyzer Source Code Ruling Upheld
dfn_deux writes "In a follow up to a 2005 story where Florida judge Doug Henderson ruled that breathalyzer evidence in more than 100 drunk driving cases would be inadmissible as evidence at trial, the Second District Court of Appeal and Circuit Court has ruled on Tuesday to uphold the 2005 ruling requiring the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer 5000, Kentucky-based CMI Inc, to release source code for their breathalyzer equipment to be examined by witnesses for the defense of those standing trial with breathalyzer test result being used as evidence against them. '"The defendant's right to a fair trial outweighed the manufacturer's claim of a trade secret," Henderson said Tuesday. In response to the ruling defense attorney, Mark Lipinski, who represents seven defendants challenging the source codes, said the state likely will be forced to reduce charges — or drop the cases entirely.' ... What this really means is that outside corporations cannot sell equipment to the state of Florida and expect to hide the workings of their machine by saying they are trade secret. It means the state has to give full disclosure concerning important and critical aspects of the case."
The thing I like about open source is that everyone can make the software better. Why a company wouldn't want to produce source code, is beyond me. I think they fear that they will be viewed as incompetent when several mistakes are found in their code, or that sneaky randomizer function call rears its ugly head.
In all seriousness, companies would do well to realize that open source increases revenues by enabling a larger FREE workforce to do your work for you. Put aside your griefs with secrecy, unless of course your code doesn't work, or you stole large chunks of the code, and fear the legal ramifications.
I'd hate to be in their position, either way.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
No. It means a bunch of drunk drivers will be on the streets free to run whoever they want over. Even if the prosecutors move to blood test, the defendants will require a medical doctor or lab technician to testify as to the nature of the exam and how the test works, and perhaps the manufacturer of the reagents used in the tests have to verify that they are what they are. Tons of money have to be spent by the DA's office, which means higher taxes. Meanwhile, prosecution of drunk driving will go down, and more drunk drivers will be on the streets.
Everyone wins!
But ask yourself: if a judge dismissed exculpatory DNA evidence because the defense didn't procure a geneticist/scientist to testify on the stand, what would you say?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I will bet money on one of three outcomes:
1. Breathalyzers cease to be used.
2. The source code will be released and showed to have MAJOR flaws or an algorithm that is not scientific at all.
3. The source code will be suddenly patched and every system will be required to be updated. The "new" source code will be released. Prosecution rates plummet, for some "unknown" reason.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If you're pulled over and suspected of DUI, then don't take the damn test
In many states, refusal to take a breathalyzer test is legally presumed an admission of guilt. You'll have a much harder time reversing a conviction based on a refusal to take the test (to wit: voluntary admission of guilt without evidence thereof) than challenging the accuracy of the instruments used.
Good luck with that.
(BTW: the whole "release the source code" thing is more a rasing-the-stakes legal tactic than a legitimate questioning of the equipment involved. Are you REALLY ready to expend considerable resources to find vindicating flaws in a commercial product? You have to convince the prosecutor you will do it, and succeed, before he'll drop charges in favor of keeping that revenue path flowing.)
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
in the UK, the hand-held testers are indicative only. If you fail the test, you're taken to the station for a breath test on a seriously big machine (think old minicomputer sized) or have a blood test, taken by a doctor, for use in a subsequent court case.
I'm sure there are all kinds of health-and-safety, human-rights, and civil-liberties reasons why blood samples cannot be taken at the roadside by a police officer.
minnesota is actually involved in a similar case with the same company: http://wcco.com/crime/breathalyzer.lawsuit.minnesota.2.669505.html. the only difference is that in our case, the state dept of public safety claims that its part of the contract that the source code be made available to the state and cmi is still refusing to provide source.
I don't know much about breathalyzers besides what they do. Is the source code really the limiting factor to you making a competing line of breathalyzers? I would think the sensor that measures the alchohol on your breath would be the most expensive and most difficult to manufacture part of the whole thing. Perhaps wrongly I would have assumed the source code would be the third easiest thing to make, behind the case for the thing and the hose you breathe into. In other words, I would have assumed that the source code would have been nothing too secret, while the actual sensor was what they spent a lot of money developing.
Of course, if the source code were very simple, I guess the company probably would have released it rather than facing the 2 mil fines. Or maybe that's just typical corporate arrogance.
Can someone explain this to me (hopefully keeping in mind that I have no background in coding)?
At least in florida, there isn't any specific requirement for a positive result from breathalyzer. The testimony of the officer, the veracity of which will be improved by your actions, actually is enough.
All you will have done is ensure that you are going to get arrested and charged with having an open container. You could even be charged with tampering with evidence/obstruction, if they can show what your intention was and it is going to be very unlikely that you will receive any leniency from the court or prosecutor.
That's probably a bad idea.
Uh... they do. They have the same sort of records for the breathalyzers. I was "fortunate" enough to be chosen for a DWI jury in Texas and we were offered testimony and evidence of exactly that.
Sadly, we had a hung jury because two jurors thought he "didn't look that drunk", even though he was clearly not behaving the way a sane, sober person would act in a situation with that much on the line and he blew more than twice the legal limit (while under age, no less).
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
I'm a graduate student in a research lab that does research on solid state sensors for volatile organic compounds, which is essentially what breathalyzers are. I also do the programming of the instruments acquiring data (in Labview). I would find it pretty unlikely that the source code itself is especially hard to write, unless there is something unusual going on. Either the company is just stonewalling because they can, or the code either: A. Reveals some proprietary method of detection through the calculations performed or B. The corrections that must be gone through are so involved that they are actually worried that their sensor may be invalidated.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was B, as there is a reason that breathalyzers have to be recalibrated relatively frequently. It is pretty difficult to make a sensor that doesn't degrade over time, and correcting for this degradation can be quite complicated.
If you walk up to a cop and he arrests you for DUI, you may have a decent false arrest case on your hands
I don't know. These days you can get a DUI for driving a lawn mower, bicycle, horse or wheel chair and even for not driving your car by sleeping in it while drunk. How long can it be before the MADD morons get sneakers included.
Who is John Galt?
Anecdote != Data
Fuck you.
Nobody allows drunk drivers on the road.
I was responding to a post that said, "let's not get drunk drivers off the road".
And the person you responded to was joking.
Yes, I realize that it was a joke. Thanks. But referring to the death of innocent people who, as often as not, are in no way responsible for the accident as "culling the herd" isn't funny. Making a joke about somebody 'Darwinning' himself doing something stupid? OK. Even if it was something a little sicker about a kid wandering into the street and being hit by a car improving the gene pool, there's at least some element of sick humor. Referring to the deaths of innocent people at the hands of drunk drivers is in no way funny. It's just sick and incredibly insensitive.
Get counseling, you seem to need it.
Because I wanted to illustrate to wombat that he was being insensitive and that drunk driving victims are, in fact, real people? Or because it's obvious that losing my sister has resulted in a bit of a grudge against drunk drivers? Perhaps a therapist can help me get past that and I can just accept them as wacky road hazards and laugh at jokes about innocent people being killed.
Go find a mother with a mentally disabled child and start telling her retard jokes. I hope she kicks you in the balls for me.
I was starting to wonder if anyone was smart enough to realize the correlation between this case and other criminal convictions based on electronically generated evidence. Red Light Camera Systems are a travesty and cause more problems than they fix, but they make a lot of money for the governments and are therefore used. I am excited by this ruling because it sets precedence that can be used to destroy these cameras and actually make the government start convicting people based on real offences and not made up ones!!!!!
My software never has bugs.
It just develops random features.
For any device used by the police the manufacturer should have to prove that the device has a failure rate of zero. If the device gives any false positives then how can it be trusted, somebody is going to be convicted who shouldn't have been. Has anybody heard of the story of a speed gun measuring a wall traveling at 40MPH?
I completely disagree, I recently did a ridealong with my father in law and he pulled the plate of EVERY vehicle we approached for any kind of enforcement activity. The system automatically pulled the record for the registered owner and for the vehicle itself. The records for the owner had a fairly astounding amount of information including addresses of everyone who had ever been associated with the owner through any kind of police report.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
If a company makes a product and claims that it is more accurate than the competition, that claim should be tested. If it doesn't make the claim, then it should be tested anyway. A justice product like this must be held to a standard: if it doesn't work as the legal system believes that it works, then it should not be used as evidence.
Of course, I don't really see what this has to do with source code in this case. Sure, someone might find a bug--if that's what happened, then cool. But what matters is actual performance, not how they achieved that performance. And that is something that should be measured by an independent testing organisation.
Of course, there are bugs that are hard to reproduce. A "if the clock says this, then increase the blood alcohol reading by 10%" bug (or feature) would be hard to test, and easy to see in the source code. That's a contrived example, though.
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Within a margin of error? Well if I were thrown in jail because I'd been determined 98% likely to be guilty by a machine, I would contest as much as I could, and the point of these rulings, besides the right of the accused to know how the device providing evidence against him works, is that breathalyzers with possibly bad coding can cast reasonable doubt onto the charge. The key word is reasonable. I would not, for example, claim that a stray electron could have entered the circuit and made it blink 0.08%.
Mod parent up.
Even Candice Lightner, who founded MADD (the major force behind US drunk driving laws), left the group in 1985 because it had become a collective of neo-prohibitionists.
Bring back Sirius Punk!
This is in a small sleepy suburb that has had a handful of homicides in my entire lifetime (I'm 30). I'm pretty sure that is SOP for all but the most rural of departments nationwide. Information systems really has changed the way policework is done. As an example when responding to a fight in a particular housing development one officer noted an individual who he believed was not supposed to be at that location. He did a quick search and was able to retrieve that the restraining order against the individual had expired and that a relative of his had moved back into the complex. Because of the information systems harassment of this individual wasn't needed, quite a nice outcome I would say =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's not just the code that does the calculation. It's the firmware that gathers the analog data from the sensors and converts it to digital. It's the software that is used to perform the calibration. It's the display software that interprets the results and puts them onscreen. Heck, it's even the control menus that the cops use to identify the test they want to perform.
There are multiple possible points of failure in the breathalyzer that could affect the displayed reading, and given the typical QC of most software projects, it wouldn't surprise me if the defense finds at least one software defect that can give false positives under certain conditions.
We are the 198 proof..