Hundreds of DWI cases in doubt after breathalyzer goof
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The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is requiring law enforcement agencies statewide to verify the accuracy of their breathalyzer instruments after discovering calibration errors that rendered hundreds of DWI breath tests inadmissible in court.
The issue first came to light in Aitkin County, where defense attorney Chuck Ramsay found that an officer failed to properly calibrate a DataMaster machine despite documentation claiming otherwise. That discovery led to the dismissal of several DWI cases and the invalidation of 73 breath tests.
“And while the documentation shows that the officer changed this gas cylinder, the control, his body-worn camera, revealed that he did not,” Ramsay said.
Ramsay – who spoke with Minnesota Now on Monday – said that without a properly-documented control cylinder, prosecutors can’t use the breathalyzer evidence in court. Ramsay’s discovery led to the dismissal of his clients’ cases and the invalidation of 73 tests in Aitkin County.
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The BCA later confirmed similar problems with machines in Winona, Chippewa, Hennepin and Olmsted counties, including more than 140 potentially affected cases in the latter two jurisdictions. The agency has suspended the use of all 220 DataMaster instruments across Minnesota until each one is inspected and verified.
BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said the machines themselves are reliable when properly maintained but acknowledged that human error caused the recent problems. In an effort to prevent more errors, Evans said that only BCA staff, and not local officers will install the gas cylinders and calibrate the DataMaster machines.
“It’s important to know that this instrumentation is reliable, and the testing itself, in terms of how the instrumentation works, is a reliable machine,” Evans said at a news conference Monday.
But Ramsay is warning that the scope of the problem could be much larger than currently known, and that hundreds of DWI convictions may need to be reviewed. Ramsay believes the number of affected cases could ultimately be much higher than the state’s current estimate.
