Posted by duijim in on February 18, 2025
An Atlanta DUI attorney can help you avoid serious legal consequences by challenging the maintenance and calibration of breathalyzer devices or finding flaws in field sobriety tests.
An alcohol DUI conviction can tarnish your image and make employment difficult, so investing in legal representation to help avoid conviction is worth the cost.
1. Maintenance and Calibration
Breathalyzers are devices used to measure the alcohol content in an individual’s breath and can provide evidence of driving under the influence. Like all equipment, breathalyzers require regular maintenance and calibration – law enforcement agencies must keep detailed records regarding dates, procedures, results of calibrations so defense attorneys may use this data against breath test evidence in court.
Personal and professional breath testers alike require frequent calibration in order to produce accurate readings. The calibration process involves subjecting the device to a dry gas standard containing known concentrations of alcohol and then comparing test results against known values. Over time, calibration standards may shift, leading to inaccurate blood alcohol concentration readings on your device.
Maintenance issues with breathalyzers can have a substantial effect on their functioning and accuracy of results, and an experienced Atlanta DUI attorney can identify potential maintenance concerns and explain how these may influence test outcomes in order to assist their client build a strong defense strategy against DUI allegations.
2. Chain of Custody
Maintaining accurate chain of custody documentation for physical evidence is of critical importance if your case goes to trial. Accuracy will increase its chances of acceptance by the court and further convince it of its authenticity.
Law enforcement uses chain of custody to establish that evidence presented in court matches what was originally taken from crime scenes or persons, most often drugs and alcohol evidence in criminal trials; but firearms, as well as other fungible goods can fall under this umbrella.
Chain of custody begins from when evidence was first seized or collected and continues through any examinations and tests as well as court presentation. For it to be valid evidence, all steps in its collection and documentation must have been followed throughout this process.
Defendants in Atlanta DUI cases who tamper with or contaminate evidence risk having it excluded from court consideration, making a skilled Atlanta DUI attorney indispensable when building their defense strategy. A similar legal challenge may also arise from calibration/maintenance errors or improper handling of field sobriety tests.
3. Drugs and Medications
An experienced DUI attorney can challenge the results of a breath test by scrutinizing its conditions of administration. These could include physiological variations between individuals taking it, the location where testing took place, maintenance and calibration history for their machine months beforehand, as well as past inaccurate samples from its devices.
Certain medications can have an enormously detrimental impact on a breath alcohol content (BAC) test. Over-the-counter and prescription drugs may lead to feelings of drowsiness, dizziness, confusion or impaired reaction times – symptoms which appear on field sobriety tests as signs of impairment. Examples include antidepressants, allergy medications, sleep aids, pain relievers and some cold medicines.
As previously discussed, some medical conditions and diet can influence your BAC results. If you suffer from acid reflux, for instance, consuming carbonated beverages like soda or mouthwash could leave an alcohol-like residue behind in your mouth and increase BAC readings.
Under Georgia law, driving under the influence of any drug that reduces driving safety is illegal and could include both illegal and legal medications such as opioids, benzodiazepines and muscle relaxants. Our DUI Lawyer can assess your case to see if your breathalyzer test could have been affected by legal medications that effected its results.
4. Mouth Alcohol
If you consume alcohol before taking a breath test, mouth alcohol could skew your results and result in false DUI charges. Mouth alcohol can come from many sources including mouthwash or dental work that traps traces of it in crevices such as braces or dentures; acid reflux or gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) also produce it, creating conditions in which this form of mouth alcohol could make a test read higher than it really should. The presence of mouth alcohol could make a DUI breath test read higher than it actually should have indicated!
Law enforcement officers must take special care to ensure nothing is in a subject’s mouth prior to administering a breath test, waiting 20 minutes afterward so any residual alcohol has dissipated from their bodies. Unfortunately, however, even this method is not foolproof: certain mouthwash products contain alcohol while medications like cough syrups and antiseptics contain alcohol bases; breath sprays as well as dental products such as rinses and gels also may contain something that skews breath test results.
DUI attorneys can also challenge the accuracy of breathalyzers by conducting thorough analyses on device, testing procedures, and qualifications of officers administering tests to uncover any flaws in evidence gathering that could weaken prosecution case and create successful DUI defense strategies for their cases. As soon as possible after arrest or being accused, consult a knowledgeable Atlanta DUI lawyer about your options to best defend against their case and discuss the best course of action available to them.