Taimoor Rana is seasoned criminal defense attorney specializing in DUI related cases. He shares his expert legal opinion here « Do Breathalyzers Discriminate Against Women?
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- If you have been charged for DUI and if it has been shown by a breath test that your blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is .08% or higher, then you are guilty. Of course, it does not matter, whether you are a man or a women: there is no discrimination in law.
Maybe they should…
It has been found by the researchers at the University School of Medicine in Trieste, Italy, that the stomach lining contains an enzyme called gastric alcohol dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol, and in women this enzyme is less than a men. In order to determine the relative effects of the enzyme, they gave alcohol both orally and intravenously to groups of alcoholic and non-alcoholic men and women.
It has been found that women reached the same levels of blood alcohol as men after drinking only half as much; having taken the weight differences into account, it has been founded by them that women reached BAC levels illegal in a DUI case after drinking 20 to 30 percent less alcohol than men.
The scientists’ concluded that when defining safe levels of drinking for driving motor vehicles legislatures may need to consider sex differences in drunk driving laws.
Yet it has been found by another study that women have lower "partition ratios" of blood to breath. What kind of ratios are these? Well, the amount of alcohol in a person’s breath is measured by all breath machines in DUI cases. But what we really want to know is the amount of alcohol in the person’s blood. So how would we get that? It is simple: there is a small computer in the Breathalyzer by which the amount of alcohol it detects in the breath sample is multiplied by 2100 times.
This is based upon the theory that, there are 2100 units of alcohol in the blood for every unit of alcohol in the breath on average. (Here you should note that: that’s an average but it varies from person to person.) Women have a significantly lower partition ratio, according to the study. And as much lower the ratio will be, the higher will be the reading, even though the true BAC does not vary. For instance, a woman having a true BAC of .06% and a ratio of 1500:1 (rather than the presumed 2100:1) will get a reading on the machine of .09% which is above the legal limit. Looking it in another way, an average man accused of drunk driving will be shown innocent by the breath machine but a woman having the same blood alcohol level will prove to be guilty by the machine.
And then there’s the problem of birth control….
It has been found by the scientists in Canada that women who takes oral contraceptive steroids (O.C.S.) appeared to eliminate ethanol significantly faster than women that do not take O.C.S. Papple, on the Rate of Post-Absorptive Phase Decline of Blood Alcohol Concentration the effects of Oral Contraceptive Steroids in the Adult Woman, 15(1) Canadian Society of Forensic Science Journal 17 (1982). What it means is that women will reach peak BAC faster, and return to lower levels more quickly. Of course due to this there could be serious problems in a DUI case when attempting to estimate BAC at the time of driving that is based upon a breath test that would be administered one hour later. This problem has become more worse, as it as been discovered by the researchers that women who were taking birth control pills or who were pregnant had higher levels of acetaldehyde on their breath, this is due to the fact that they have decreased ability to metabolize the enzyme as the level of sex steroids increases.
So what?
Well, infrared analysis is used by most breath machines in measuring the breath sample of a DUI suspect. But alcohol is not really measured by these machines, rather then that they measure any compound which contains the "methyl group" in its molecular structure. And acetaldehyde is also one of these compounds. It will result in a higher "blood alcohol" reading on the Breathalyzer. It has always been a problem when the law, in its infinite wisdom, assumes that all of us are exactly the same.
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