The Ohio Supreme Court handed down an important ruling last week when it said that those defendants charged with drunk driving have the right to challenge the accuracy of the individual breath-testing machine used in their case. Experts say the decision could lead to thousands of challenges from those defendants who entered not guilty pleas and were denied similar evidence in the past.
In this case, the Court voted unanimously to uphold the ruling from a lower court which had thrown out the breath test results for a man who was repeatedly denied data about the breathalyzer machine in his case by the Ohio Department of Health. The man and his lawyer had requested prior testing results and accuracy information concerning the Intoxilyzer 8000 that was used to measure his BAC.
The Ohio Department of Health responded to the subpoena from the man’s lawyer by saying that it was unable to turn over data specific to the machine used in the man’s case. As a result, the lower court said that without data proving the accuracy of the machine that could be analyzed by the defense, the results of the test must be dismissed.
In Ohio, the law prevents defendants in drunk driving cases from making general challenges about the reliability or scientific accuracy of breath-testing devices. This means lawyers can’t argue before a jury that all breathalyzers are inaccurate and thus the results from a particular case should be dismissed. However, under the new approach endorsed by the Supreme Court, lawyers are allowed to challenge the results and reliability of specific machines.
The trouble for prosecutors is that, as it currently stands, the Ohio Department of Health lacks the ability to collect and distribute testing information about each specific breath-testing machine. The Department has said that it lacks the employees and technology to create such a database. However, the Court was unconvinced with this argument.
The Court’s opinion noted that defendants in drunk driving cases have the right to information about a machine’s accuracy, calibration and other matters. Just because a state has approved the use of a machine does not prevent the accuracy of the device from being challenged.
Defense attorneys argued that the Department of Health is easily able to provide such information, but refuses to do so because of reliability issues with the machines. In fact, the Intoxilyzer 8000 is a device that has been challenged for years based on its accuracy and is not allowed into evidence in some courtrooms in Ohio as a result.
DUI defense experts believe the ruling could result in big changes in the way that breath tests are taken and data is stored in Ohio. If the Department of Heath doesn’t make changes, and quickly, to the way it categorizes testing data then other suspects could also have their results dismissed when the Department fails to provide the requested information.
Source: “Court ruling allows challenge to DUI breath tests,” by Randy Ludlow, published at Dispatch.com.
