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SFPD Breathalyzer Mistake Puts Hundreds of DUI Convictions In Doubt
Mr. Shotgun writes "According to CBS, 'Hundreds, or even thousands, of drunk driving convictions could be overturned because the San Francisco Police Department has not tested its breathalyzers, officials said Monday. For at least six years, the police officers in charge of testing the 20 breathalyzers used by the Police Department did not carry out any tests on the equipment. Officers instead filled the test forms with numbers that matched the control sample, said Public Defender Jeff Adachi, throwing countless DUI convictions into doubt.' Apparently this has happened before."
Unless, of course, you're guilty and looking for plausible deniability......
But then, if you aren't guilty, take the breath test and if you fail, ask for the blood test.......otherwise, you have to take a ride to the station for the blood test, and all of that other inconvenience.
If you fail you'll get a ride to the station anyway. The advisability of refusing a test aside; it's still not that hard to get convicted of DUI based on other evidence. I served on a DUI jury, and all a breath test would have done is shorten the time it took to reach a verdict from 2 days to probably 2 hours. We took our job seriously and debated each piece of evidence, so not having a breath gets probably helps a case but it is not a slam dunk acquittal by a long shot.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Unbelievable. I worked for Phoenix Police for nine years doing computer work. We had implemented an optical document management system when DUI attorneys started subpoenaing Intoxilyzer maintenance records as SOP when it came to cases, so we started scanning all calibration and maintenance records as part of our SOP. It also made it ridiculously easy to fulfill the subpoena. Our Intoxilyzers were calibrated by the crime lab, so it was actual chemists with a vested interest in accuracy, so it was done right. And this was back in the 90's!
Just unbelievable that SFPD could be so stupid. There's no excuse for this, whoever is in charge of that calibration really needs to get their heads handed to them. And so does the prosecutor's office for not checking this.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I did calibration in the military. We calibrated the breathalyzers at my command, among other things, and it wasn't uncommon to find one bad out of every 3-4 using the manufacturer's recommended interval. Using the recommended interval *should* generally mean that you won't find any devices out of tolerance, and any units that are close to being out of tolerance are either adjusted or discarded.
Certifying a unit as being calibrated without actually performing the verification is colloquially called a "lick & stick." In the military, it's a potentially NJP (non-judicial punishment) offense on its own, which could be considered something like a misdemeanor. And if it there any actual consequences as a result, like damage or destruction of equipment or injury or death of personnel, you could easily be facing a court martial, which is more like felony charges.
Apparently they do things a little differently at the SFPD.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I would hope that would be no more possible than flashlight emitting a lethal dose of visible light.
The GP is right. Take a flashlight, focus the light into a point (into an image of the LED crystal, to be precise) and point into your eye. You'd lose vision in that eye pretty quick.
X-ray scanners are scanning you with a medium power (? no data) beam. Each spot of your skin is exposed to that beam for a fraction of a second; an average exposure is supposed to be low. Imagine that I take a hot soldering iron and slide its tip across your chest. Each patch of the skin under the iron's tip heats up to 450F, but since there are many of those patches the average temperature is only, say, 45F - which is totally harmless. Would you like to lay down here, please, while I heat the iron up?
A catastrophic fault will stop the beam of the scanner. The entire output of the X-ray tube will be directed at a single spot of your body, wherever it happened to be at the time of failure. There could be many causes of that, from mechanical (insufficient grease; plastic gear stripped; motor burned out; the MOSFET controlling the motor is blown; motor's power supply failed) to programming (the software crashed in mid-scan.) That would be analogous to me starting to slide that hot soldering iron across your chest, but then just stopping the movement half-way, leaving the iron's tip on your skin, and going for a dinner. It'll burn a hole all the way through you by the time I'm back...
Nobody knows how reliable the X-ray scanner is. For all I know, it may be controlled by a Windows 95 box. You'd need to be awfully reckless to step inside one of those scanners. Technically illiterate people may see scanners as an opaque magic box and go through them without a second thought. But an engineer knows how dangerous those things are.