Taimoor Rana is seasoned criminal defense attorney specializing in DUI related cases. He shares his expert legal opinion here Collier Wrestling Coach Charged with DUI »
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- In Collier County the DUI cops have arrested a wrestling coach at Gulf Coast High School on Sunday after a drunken road rage incident.
The deputies of Collier County have arrested Shane Hillis on Sunday night near Goodlette Frank Road and Vanderbilt Drive.
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Breathalyzers: Why Aren’t They Warranted to Measure Alcohol? »
If you are facing drunk driving charges, then you must have taken (unless that you refuse) a chemical test for checking a blood alcohol concentration (BAC). It has been noted that the test will be done with a breath machine in the great majority of cases. When you face the trial in a court then you will come to know that you have been charged with not just one, but with two crimes.
First Charge:
The first crime with which you have been charged is the so-called "per se" offense: driving while having a BAC of .08% or greater. It doesn’t matter and no one actually cares whether you were intoxicated or not. It would be proved by all of the evidence that without question you were sober: your condition is not the crime, instead of that the crime is your chemical composition. And what is the sole source of evidence used by the police officers upon which you will be either convicted or acquitted? Just a machine.
Second Charge:
The second charge that you have to face is "driving under the influence of alcohol" ("DUI"), or in some states, it is referred to as "driving while intoxicated" ("DWI") or "operating under the influence" ("OUI"). All of them are basically the same thing. However in each case, it can be proved by the prosecution that you were under the influence of alcohol by offering the results of the same breath test into evidence and the jury will be instructed that it should be refutably believed that the defendant is guilty unless he can prove otherwise.
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What Happened to the Presumption of Innocence? »
This happens in most countries of the world, an illegal charges by the State forces the accused to prove himself innocent. However, in America, the presumption of innocence has always been a fundamental part of our rights as a free people.
This basic protection that has been given against the power of the government has been recognized as flowing from the 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments to our Constitution. As said by the United States Supreme Court, “The principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal law.” Coffin v. U.S., 156 U.S. 432 (1895).
So what has happened to this presumption of innocence in a case of drunk driving? Can we consider this as another example of “the DUI exception to the Constitution”? So let us take a look at how this fundamental right has been slowly eroded by our DUI laws….
So now Let us assume that you have been arrested for drunk driving, and a reading of .09% blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) is shown by breathalyzers. By the breathalyzer you will be charged probably with two crimes:
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GERD, Acid Reflux and False Breathalyzer Results »
Steve is currently facing criminal charges for driving under the influence of alcohol. Although he was not under the influence of alcohol. It is just that he had one drink after work and then he was stopped at a DUI sobriety checkpoint on the way to home. The officer who has stopped him smelled the alcohol on his breath and asked Steve to step out of his car so that he may take some field sobriety tests. He did fairly well on the tests but, to make it more sure that he was not driving under influence, the officer asked him to breathe into the breath machine that had been set up by them at the checkpoint.
The results show .09%. Steve was then immediately arrested for DUI, handcuffed and they had taken him to jail; his license was immediately confiscated by the police officers and they have given him a notice of automatic suspension. When finally he was released after six hours, they gave him a notice to appear in court for arraignment on drunk driving charges.
What had happened?
How could James have only consumed one beer but registered .09% on the machine which is at least four times higher than what it would be expected?
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Do Breathalyzers Discriminate Against Women? »
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.
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Why the Breathalyzers don’t Work Properly »
Here I am giving just one of many examples explaining why the breathalyzers do not work properly. The computers that are inside Breathalyzers what actually do is that they just multiply the amount of alcohol in a DUI suspect’s breath sample 2100 times in order to get the blood alcohol concentration ("BAC").
It happens because they are programmed in such a way that they assume that the suspect has 2100 units of alcohol in his blood for every single unit of alcohol in his breath. This is what we call the "partition ratio". But this ratio is only an average: actual ratios shows variation from as low as 900:1 to as high as 3500:1; if individual ratio is different, then surely the BAC result will be different.
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10 DWI/DUI Myths and Their Facts – Part – 2 »
In the previous part you must have read few myths and their facts. This is the next part of the article about myths and facts of DUI/DWI. In this article also you will read about some other myths and facts of DUI/DWI cases.
Myth # 6:
It is believed that the breathalyzers and other breath testers are accurate.
Fact:
There are too many sources of error in breath testers. These errors affect the result of these breathalyzers test.
Quit Smoking or Get Ready for DUI Arrest
You should consider this thing. In our breath a compound named acetaldehyde is present that is falsely recorded as alcohol by breath analyzers.
The most important that tobacco smokers must know is the fact that the levels of acetaldehyde in their lungs are much, much higher than those in the lungs of non-smokers. This means that the possibility of false high readings on a Breathalyzer or other machine is greater for smokers.
So with this there comes another reason due to which the smokers should quit smoking and that reason is the danger of arrest and false conviction of DWI/DUI. So I must advise the smokers to quit smoking before they are arrested for DUI/DWI.
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