State v. C.R.

.116 BREATH TEST! Thank you to the jury for standing up for this man, because he never stood a chance with the Officers. Client was called in by a concerned citizen. A police officer happened to pull up next to the caller and the caller said “this guys drunk!” Not knowing that my client was a 63 year old Spanish speaker who had problems with his night vision. Client was pulled over by a vehicular assault task force member on Cinco De Mayo and was Hispanic. Client told the officer he couldn’t speak English. Upon interview of the caller, he said he almost hit 4 vehicles and was driving slow around the corner from 610 north to 45. The caller then told another officer he almost his 6 people. On the stand the caller said he honestly almost hit a couple. But this started the snowball. The first officer immediately handcuffed client and called the DWI Task Force. The DWI Officer who showed up won the award for the most DWI arrests by MADD in 2018. The first officer told the DWI Officer this guy is drunk, he’s good to go and that client could speak enough English. They then laughed and joked about how many arrests they were going to get on Cinco De Mayo and how the night was young and this would be their first one. The DWI Officer uncuffed the client and proceeded to give him all of the tests in English and interview him in English. She literally testified that if she spoke slower then he could understand. That’s not how languages work. She was very confident on the stand and even laughed a couple times. I had to remind her that a man’s freedom was not a laughing matter. The jury realized the client never stood a chance. He did the best he could with the charades they performed for the standard field sobriety tests. An expert was able to come in and discuss the problems in the breath test and the inherent problems in the Intoxilyzer 9000. The machine was removed from service 10 days after his test. It was removed in such a bad condition they couldn’t even run a diagnostic test. But within the month before his test the machine was running test on individuals that showed them losing .036 alcohol within 10 minutes: that’s like metabolizing 2 beers within 10 minutes. That defies the laws of science. The Breath test technical supervisor refused to admit anything was wrong (they never do) and even said the poor soul who blew right before removal was still a valid test. The machine was literally defying the laws of science and she would not admit the test was compromised. This is why we need independent labs with independent analysts. The jury returned a swift verdict of Not Guilty and gave this hard working man his freedom and life back. Thank you to Judge Fleischer for running a fair and just trial. Thank you to that jury for remaining true to your doubts and demanding better our of our law enforcement and police labs. And thank you to God for bringing it all together.