WTSP Tampa charges Florida covered up faulty DUI machines for years.

[madfloridian]

There is a video at the link.

10 News Investigators: Charges that FDLE covered up faulty DUI machines

Thousands of people in Florida convicted of DUI may not have been drunk at all. They very well may have been under the allowable blood alcohol limit. The problem may have been law enforcement not calibrating the breathalyzer called the Intoxilyzer 8000.

Now, the 10 News Investigators have uncovered documents and emails that prove the state knew there were problems and didn't do anything to correct it for more than two and half years.

"I agree that drunk driving is wrong. We need to get drunk drivers off the road, but we should not be convicting people of drunk driving with evidence that we know is not reliable," says former prosecutor turned defense attorney Robert Harrison.

..."The 10 News Investigators obtained letters where a Sarasota deputy noticed there was a problem recording breath samples and breath flow levels as far back as 2007. He wrote in his notes that he even alerted an inspector who agreed there was a problem.

Those notes prompted an email from the head of the breath testing program, Laura Barfield, telling inspectors not to write down flow sensor problems in their field notes.

More from the Herald Tribune:

Florida DUI cases built on faulty test results

Inspectors in the process of checking every machine this year have so far found that about 40 percent of 231 machines were incorrectly measuring the flow of breath into the Intoxilyzer 8000, including machines in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties.

Since the breath flow sensors were not checked before 2008, there is no way to know how long they had been incorrectly calibrated since the machines went into service in 2006.

FDLE started quietly fixing the machines in January and putting them back into service, without noting how far off the machines' measurements were. The officials are not informing defendants who may have been wrongfully convicted or unfairly lost their driver's licenses after being tested on the flawed machines.

[Jkid]

1. The real question

Why didn't Florida did anything to fix the problem.

[d_r]

2. I have no doubt

this is true everywhere. I've never known any technology to be infallible.

[AzDar]

3. Outrageous.

:kick:

[frylock]

4. never EVER submit to a breathalyzer..

or a field sobriety test for that matter.