You are driving home from a friend’s house late at night, and a police officer pulls you over. When the officer comes up to your window, they tell you that they thought you were swerving in your lane and that you may be intoxicated. It is one of the common signs they look for when searching for drunk drivers. The police officer wants you to take a breath test.
You do not think you are over the legal limit, and you do not feel impaired at all, so you agree to the test. To your surprise, it comes back with a reading of a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.09%. The officer says that you are over the legal limit and you are going to jail.
Calibration issues
At a time like this, an important question to ask is whether or not the breath test you were given was actually calibrated. If the police department was lax on their protocols and did not calibrate the device frequently enough or perform routine maintenance on a set schedule, you may be able to contest that the breath test itself was not accurate. Maybe you were under the legal limit the entire time, just like you thought, but an inaccurate device provided an artificially inflated reading.
This can especially be an issue for underage drivers. Due to zero-tolerance laws, they have a far lower legal limit – any underage driver with alcohol in their system could be arrested. Almost any amount of alcohol can trigger the test, and even a slight miscalibration could make it appear that an underage driver has alcohol in their system when they actually do not.
Are you facing drunk driving charges and wondering about all of your legal defense options? It can be helpful to have an experienced defense firm on your side at this time.
