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DUI Charges Dismissed Against Woman Whose Body Brews Alcohol (cnn.com)
HughPickens.com writes:
CNN reports that a judge dismissed DUI charges against a woman in upstate New York after being presented with evidence the woman suffers from "auto-brewery syndrome" even though she blew a blood alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. "I had never heard of auto-brewery syndrome before this case," says attorney Joseph Marusak. "But I knew something was amiss when the hospital police took the woman to wanted to release her immediately because she wasn't exhibiting any symptoms." Also known as gut-fermentation syndrome, this rare medical condition can occur when abnormal amounts of gastrointestinal yeast convert common food carbohydrates into ethanol. The process is believed to take place in the small bowel, and is vastly different from the normal gut fermentation in the large bowel that gives our bodies energy.
DUI means driving while under the influence of alcohol as measured by your blood alcohol content. It is alcohol in your blood that impairs your ability to drive. It doesn't matter how it got there. Whether you drink, take too much cough medicine, or have a medical condition that causes you to produce alcohol, it's still in your blood and impairing your ability to drive. Now, if it's a first offense, and the defendant didn't know they had the disease, I can see letting them off with a warning, but if the defendant knew about the condition then they have no business driving. Some medical conditions make it unsafe to drive. Blind people, for instance, can't drive. It sucks, but it happens.
Except that, if you'd actually read the article (or god forbid, the summary), she showed absolutely no symptoms of it at all until it reached ~0.30, which would be enough to kill most of us. If she suffers no ill effects from it, and it didn't change anything, why not give her a waiver for it? The judge made a reasonable ruling, which is rare for a newstory, especially here. And even though it doesn't seem to have an effect, she put herself on a no sugar, no alcohol, extremely low carb diet to help cut it back a little bit. For once, a news story that doesn't involve negative drama!
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Note that this does not say they did a blood test with a blood alcohol content result of nearly 0.4. They did breath test that produced results that would correspond with a BAC of nearly 0.4 in a normal person. The entire point that this condition affects the relation between breath alcohol measurements and actual blood alcohol content.
Strict liability offenses are an affront to justice and should be done away sooner rather than later.
This woman should not take the blame for a medical condition that she did not know about. Getting a flat tire is not necessarily the same as getting in an accident. And even if she had caused an accident, she cannot be blamed for it by her blood alcohol levels alone, because apparently she was functioning normally even when the breathalizer tests showed she had a blood alcohol level of between 0.3 and 0.4.
If I were a defense attorney I would go to great lengths to show that the premise of the correlation between the amount of alcohol in someone's breath and his/her actual blood alcohol level is false in his/her case. That can be easily proven by taking an actual blood test. If that test shows that the actual promillage of alcohol in her blood is much lower than would be expected from the breathalizer test alone, the breathalizer test is a false positive and an any arguments following from that breathalizer test are by definition false as well.
Should this woman be driving? That is not for me, you or any judge to decide. Only a medical professional can advise this woman on that matter. It is up to her to decide what she does with that advice.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.