Friday, March 9, 2012

Driving Drunk in San Francisco? Maybe You’re Weren’t

From the nice folks at Slashdot comes a story of police laziness that may end up resulting in the reversal of "hundreds, maybe thousands" of drunk-driving convictions over the past six years.

There's a billboard near my hometown that says "Drunk Driving: Ohio's Scarlet Letter". That's a bit of hype, since Ohio, like many other states, has turned the low-criminal-penalty, fine-intensive prosecution of drunk driving into a cash cow for many courts. Many attorneys, as well; the first Ferrari 360 I ever saw in the wild belonged to a famous Columbus DUI attorney.

The fiscal rewards of prosecuting drunk drivers, together with the fact that impaired vehicle operation is perhaps one of the few remaining frontiers where significant reductions in vehicular fatalities can be achieved nationwide, mean that very few law-enforcement agencies treat the topic with anything other than the utmost sincerity and seriousness. On the other side of the aisle, we have the SFPD. For at least six years, the SFPD officers in charge of the department's breathalyzers didn't bother to test or calibrate the equipment, instead simply entering the suggested control values into the test results.

It is worth noting that "fuel cell" breathalyzers, which are the only types approved for evidentiary use in the United States, require calibration at least every six months to prevent significant drift, so six years without a calibration could mean that a lot of people were wrongly convicted — or that a lot of people went free, depending on the direction of the drift.

The potential for civil damage suits has to be something just barely short of stupdendous; people can and do get fired for DUI (unless you are a "supercitizen") and the cumulative effect of years' worth of lost wages, child custody issues, further criminal penalties, increased insurance rates, and so on will likely require a pretty stout calculator to add up.

Could this lead to a decreased reliance on breathalyzers in the field for police departments worried about liability, machine error, and so on? Let's hope not: as history shows, if the cops can't Breathalyze you, they may go Twilight on yo' ass.



from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com




ifttt puts the internet to work for you. via task 680102

No comments:

Post a Comment

Archive