Are Breath or Blood Tests in DUI Cases Ever Wrong?

How to Beat a DUI in Michigan

If you are facing drunk driving charges in Michigan, you might wonder if it is even possible to beat a DUI charge. The best defense attorneys know that the answer to this question is an enthusiastic yes!

Facing a DUI/OWI is never fun. The penalties can be severe, and include loss of driving privileges and even jail time. OWI charges are very hard to win, and if you’re serious about how to dismiss a DUI charge, then you’ll need to hire a top Michigan OWI Lawyer.

The best lawyer for a DUI is one who knows the science of breath and blood tests. These test results will be the hardest piece of evidence to overcome. In fact, many attorneys think the breath and blood tests are impossible to beat. In fact, like you, non-expert DUI lawyers might also be thinking “how can a DUI get dismissed?

The best way to beat a DUI charge in Michigan is to beat the breath or blood test.

The legal limit in Michigan is .08, so if you have a breath test and it’s over .08, you’re considered guilty of drunk driving on that basis alone. There are many defense strategies involved, but plain and simple, beating a Michigan OWI requires beating the breath test.

The best drunk driving lawyers in Michigan know that breath tests are based on infrared spectroscopy. When it comes to the offense of DUI, there is no doubt that breath tests based on infrared spectroscopy are generally reliable. Where this real science sometimes goes amiss, however, is the way police officer’s maintain and use the breath testing equipment.

In many police departments there is a lack of real quality control in standards. This is especially true relative to the calibration and calibration checks of the DUI breath testing equipment. There is also the potential for a great deal of biological variability that can lead to false results.

Top 16 Ways to Beat a Breath Test

The vast majority of the approximately 35,000 citizens stopped for drunk driving each year in Michigan, only a very small number of these cases involve a DUI breath test challenge.

But there are many ways top DUI lawyers defense DUI breath test cases. In fact, breath tests can be up to 230% too high!

Here is a list of the 16 top defenses to a breath test:

1. Potential effects of mouth alcohol
2. Objects or jewelry in the mouth
3. Solvents and other chemicals
4. Endogenous acetone
5. Gastro-esophageal reflect disorders (GERD)
6. Acetaldehyde
7. Breath blood partition ratio
8. The effect of the duration of the breath sample
9. Interference based on the presence of acetaldehyde, gasoline or chloral hydrate and its metabolite trichloroethanol
10. Radio frequency interference
11. Floating Decimal Point
12. Chamber temperature.
13. Software extrapolation problems.
14. High calibration
15. Software degradation
16. Plunger problems and carryover contamination.

If you want to know more about this, read about past fraud in Michigan’s breath testing program.

Is it Possible to Beat a Blood Test?

Much the same can be said about blood testing where gas chromatography is used to measure the blood alcohol. Again, it’s not the science that is faulty, but the forensic application of the science. This is due to the sometimes obscenely bad quality assurance and quality control that passes for “science” in some forensic labs.

Many OWI lawyers think blood testing is harder to beat than breath testing. This is really not true. Yes, blood testing can be better than breath testing, but there are actually more defenses to a blood test!

The reasons there are more ways to beat a DUI blood test is because of the way the blood is tested. If you are facing a DUI charge involving blood, it’s that much more important to find a top lawyer for your case. To learn more about how to beat a DUI case with blood, read our article “Michigan DUI Hospital Blood Tests.

Finding a Top Drunk Driving Defense Lawyer

Most people with a DUI case search the internet with something like “DUI defense attorney near me” or “OWI attorney near me.” (DUI and OWI mean basically the same thing). Once you start looking at lawyer’s web sites, you may find that the start looking a lot alike. It’s always good to do a lot of cross-checking, and a good way to do this is to search the lawyer’s name separately.

When you do this, you’ll see all the different places that DUI lawyer or DUI law firm has been mentioned on the web. Look for publications and other references that are independent of the lawyer. Also scrutinize the lawyer’s reviews. A lawyer with too many five star reviews might look suspicious, especially if the reviews seem scripted, or are all kind of written in the same “voice.”

Also, when researching a top Michigan OWI lawyer, don’t rely on bogus credentials. This is another reason it’s good to do a few searches about the lawyer indendantly of their own website. See if they really do have all those awards they are bragging about.

If you think you were wrongfully accused of drunk driving in Michigan, be sure you find and hire a lawyer with the proper credentials in science. Otherwise, your lawyer is likely to be blinded by the forensic “science” and you will be wrongfully convicted.