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Originally posted by Afterthought
reply to post by MeesterB
Yeah, I'd get excited about an after work party, but I consider myself to be very professional when it comes to studies and experiments. Plus, I'm only 83 pounds, so I don't think I'd need even half of one bottle for just myself.
How do you know they all weighed differently? The article only stated that 15 were chosen. Considering they have stats on all their employees, they may have chosen them according to weight. I'm also wondering if half were male and half were female.
All I'm saying is that a scientific study is in order for trying to determine if a piece of machinery works or not. In order to see if it produces accurate results, you would need a controlled environment. This environment didn't appear to be controlled.
Where was this confident sense of justice when the Intoxilyzer 5000 was failing? Are we honestly expected to have confidence in an agency that knew for years that the Intoxilyzer was experiencing critical flaws, and boldly refused to fix those errors because of fears that fixing their mistakes would undermine the aura of perfection the BCA attempted to create around the Intoxilyzer? That’s neither justice nor good science.
What we have here is an agency that claims, in the newspapers, to be using scientific principles to ensure justice in the courtroom. What every Minnesotan needs to know, however, is that those scientific principles are typically ignored by the BCA for purely political reasons, and that always leads to injustice.
A truly independent scientific agency would not refuse to fix its Intoxilyzers for fear of looking foolish. An agency dedicated to sound science and fair convictions would not cling to an outdated and discredited method of urine testing to convict Minnesotan drivers of DWI.
Maybe a better title for that article would have been, “Science Only When it Suits Us.”
For example, did you know that statute requires that your Intoxilyzer results be rounded off - not rounded up or down, but off? This means that if you blow a 0.089, your result is a 0.08 - not a 0.09.
The source code is the magic link between your breath, the science used by the Intoxilyzer, and the State's evidence against you: Remember, source code is how the Intoxilyzer turns infrared light particles into a number that the prosecution uses as evidence. If there is an inherent flaw in the machine's computer program, then the way the machine applies the science to your breath to generate that number may not be reliable evidence and the state is still using it against you! But, without having a copy of the source code for computer scientists to look at and analyze, there's no real way to know if the code is unflawed, and the results reliable.
That's why source code is a big deal to Minnesota DUI lawyers, and to you. Why does CMI, the company that wrote the source code for the Intoxilyzer 5000EN, not want anyone to see it, though? They claim their competitors would be able to copy it and that would violate their intellectual property rights. Criminal defense attorneys in Washington, Arizona, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Minnesota have argued that not disclosing the source code violates a defendant's rights.