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This is sort of old news and if you are a Seattle DUI attorney, you certainly know about it. But I thought I'd discuss it anyway, since it is important news. It's about the breathalyzer test in King County in Washington State (basically Seattle). For the last year and a half or so, they've been inadmissible in court as evidence of DUI. The case that decided it was called Ahmach, and it was a doozy. Stay tuned to learn a little bit more about it.

One of the most troubling things about the breathalyzer test to Seattle DUI attorneys is that this test that is relied upon so heavily by prosecutors around the country is in reality junk science. The machines aren't reliable, the test itself isn't reliable, and the science isn't readily accepted in the community of science scholars (for example, I'm pretty sure there has never been a study on the breathalyzer and its reliability that has been published and subjected to scientific scrutiny). And the worst thing is that for the most part, we have no way of proving this to the court or a jury because so much of the information surrounding the test is withheld. But not any more.

A couple of years ago, several Seattle DUI attorneys got together and decided they were going to mount a fight against the breathalyzer and attack it in a way that it had never been attacked before – they questioned its scientific reliability using accepted scientific standards. In particular, they focused on the fact that an important requirement in scientific analysis was missing – something referred to as a (and I'm butchering this because I'm going from memory) standard of certainty. It is a measurement derived from thousands of tests that says for whatever result that is provided, there is a 99% surety that the result is between x and y.

For example, if the standard of certainty in a breath test is .01, a .08 test would be 99% accurate to be between .07 and .09. This is important because without that, we don't know when the test falls into and out of the legal requirements.

The court, based on this, and some shoddy lab technician practices, threw out all the results until the lab could show it was doing things correctly. We'll see how long it lasts, but it was a huge victory for DUI attorneys everywhere.

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