Joshua Davidson explains some possible defenses to suppress breath and blood tests.
Police agencies in Arizona generally use one of two methods to determine a person’s blood alcohol concentration when they’ve been stopped for DUI, blood testing and breath testing. While a test of a person’s blood is generally considered to be the more accurate and the more reliable test, breath testing is generally less expensive for the police agencies involved and easier to administer and is therefore used quite commonly. Although many agencies are switching over to blood testing, there is still a large number of agencies that use breath testing in their DUI cases.
Arizona law does allow the prosecution to use the results of a breath test into court to determine a person’s blood alcohol concentration at the time they were given, but that is subject to a number of things, including whether the instrument that was used to test the person’s breath was properly maintained, whether it was experiencing any problems, whether the person who administered the test, in other words the police officer that asked you to blow into the machine, whether that officer followed proper procedures.
An experienced DUI defense attorney knows how to evaluate a case and how to review a case where a breath test was obtained that the prosecution intends to use and see if there are any defenses or if the police did make any mistakes or if there were any errors in the maintenance of that machine that might make the breath results unreliable in the eyes of the jury or could have the results from the breath test thrown out of court all together.