Minnesota Supreme Court Rejects DUI Challenges Based On Buggy Software 391
bzzfzz writes "In a case with parallels to the Diebold Voting Machine fiasco, Minnesota's Supreme Court upheld the reliability of the Intoxilyzer 5000EN breath testing machine on a narrow 4-3 vote. Source code analysis during the six-year legal battle revealed a number of bugs that could potentially affect test results. Several thousand DUI cases that were waiting on the results of this appeal will now proceed. The ruling is one in a series of DUI-related court victories for police and prosecutors. Other recent cases upheld a conviction of a person with no evidence that the vehicle had been driven and convictions based solely on urine samples that may only show impairment hours before driving. The Intoxilyzer 5000EN is now considered obsolete, and replacement devices are being rolled out, with the last jurisdictions in the state scheduled to retire their 5000ENs by the end of the year."
Re:Minnesota, eh. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, shit.
- scratches Minnesota off the list of possible places to live.
Re:if you drink, don't drive (Score:4, Informative)
What if you're well under the legal limit and perfectly capable of driving safely but some machine says you're extremely drunk?
It's not the only state by far (Score:5, Informative)
Most if not all states will lock up mentally ill people if they are a danger to themselves or others. The difference is that it's not "for life" but rather just until the next hearing, which may be anywhere from less than a week for a person just entering the mental-health-court system to more than a year away for those who have obvious, chronic, problems that can't be sufficiently treated to allow the person to be released. The other difference is that it's to a locked mental hospital not to a prison.
Also, many if not most states treat "highly dangerous sex offenders" basically the same way as MN under "civil commitment" laws. There may be a trial, but it's typically a civil trial and by the time the state decides they want to keep you locked up, they've got enough evidence to convince a jury to the level required in a civil case. In some states this is for a period of time and they have to do a new trial but the reality is, once you've been locked up under civil commitment, you likely won't get out until your health deteriorates from old age enough that even if you still hold dangerous attitudes you won't be a danger to the public if released.
Re:Too Bad (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fatiguescience.com/assets/pdf/Alcohol-Fatigue.pdf
Such as figure 1B, which shows, on average, how mean relative performance always decreases with any alcohol (albeit trivially up to about 0.04)
or http://addictions.uchicago.edu/carl/DandAlcDependence%20Brumback.pdf
That shows only with low doses of alcohol (under about 0.042 BAC) can you not really notice a drop in performance, and after that everyone, heavy drinkers or not perform worse in cognitive tasks and that the heavy and non heavy drinking groups mirror each other in performance.
I'd give more links but if you aren't on a university campus or somewhere else that they're free it's sort of futile, and I don't really want to keep mashing links until I find ones that work without academic library access (and where I am has a med school so we're subscribed to medical journals, places without a med school might not).
But hey, why not make up some facts that 'some studies' support your argument so you can create a perception of authority without providing those studies and when the most easily findable studies (when searching for terms like cognitive impairment and blood alcohol level, and other obvious search terms produce results that disagree with you?).
Now your first line, you hit the nail on the head, before you joined the nutter bin. It's clear that BAC less than about 0.04 has so little impairment (even though it is there) you need very large sample sizes for that effect to not get lost in noise. That applies to heavy and mild drinkers equally. So if where you live has a BAC requirement of less than 0.04 they're probably playing theatre or moral/religious grounds than evidence based policy. Anyone who's at about 0.05 or worse is making a judgment call on just how much measurable impairment is tolerable, which is all science can do. Politicians have to decide risk tolerance and cost benefit analysis, science merely quantifies the effect that creates risk, and sometimes the risk itself.
Re:Minnesota, eh. (Score:5, Informative)
Do you have a source for that story? Because I've not heard about that happening.
It was a local only story; It ran on the Star Tribune and WCCO also picked it up sometime last summer. Unfortunately, neither site maintains a (free) searchable archive, so I can't give you anything more than that. Sorry. What I can do is point you in the direction of an expert on the matter locally: Chuck Ramsay [mndwidefenseblog.com], who won last year's Attorney of the Year award for this state and specializes in DUI convictions.
Some highlights from the website include: Cases pending where a vehicle can be seized by the government for suspicion of DUI when a conviction is not obtained. Minnesota also has a habit of destroying evidence used in DUI convictions after 1 year regardless of if a case is still on appeal or not (by law, you can request a retest of any positive result by a different lab; But if the sample isn't available for retesting, this obviously poses a legal problem). There are also widespread fraud regarding log entries for maintenance of the machines; Officers literally xerox old logs, change the dates, and put them back into the official record. This has also been upheld by the Court; Go through the archives on the blog, you'll find all the citations you need there.
Re:Too Bad (Score:5, Informative)
What does that have to do with convicting people based on evidence produced by buggy software?
Drunk driving is bad, mmkay? Convicting people based on bad data is far, far worse. Don't let your rage against drunks blind you to a rather extreme disregard for standards of evidence. Someday it could be you who is falsely accused based on an invalid breathalyzer reading.
Re:Careful there (Score:5, Informative)
Except that the last time somebody actually tried to do that, we ended up in a civil war. Slavery was only the excuse. The issues of state's rights went out the window when the Union won, and there's the whole business of the wholesale looting laughingly refered to as 'the Reconstruction' that I won't even get into. End result? A stronger federal government contrary to the beliefs and intents of the Founding Fathers. The point of a weak fed was to keep massive government stupidity on a local or state-wide level, not to allow it to infect and infest itself across the entire country.
Not to get TOO off-topic, but yes! (Score:5, Informative)
The traffic laws are a very sore spot for me as well. The types who go around with a "cops are heroes!" attitude get under my skin, when they actually fall for the propaganda about "we're only issuing tickets because we care about your safety".
To be honest, I'm a person who has gone my entire life with probably no more than 5 traffic tickets (including a state trooper who cited me for driving 65 in a 55MPH zone on an interstate, back when I was 18 -- and that may have been one of the only really "fair" ones I think I received). So it's not a case of me constantly getting tickets for speeding or reckless driving and having a chip on my shoulder.
I just see the entire thing as little more than tax collection / revenue generation, under a guise of performing a public service. Any time an excuse can be made to increase the financial penalties for a given violation, they jump on it, regardless of its actual effectiveness. (Just a few weeks ago, I made a road trip from St. Louis to the Chicago area, and I must have gone through at LEAST 10 different "road construction zones" with signs announcing fines would be doubled or tripled for exceeding the posted speed limits. In about 9 out of 10 of those zones, there was no actual construction taking place. In a few cases, I saw a pickup truck with one or two workers at a site, but they appeared to be there only to double-check on some details of work already completed, or ?? It was abundantly clear that there was no pressing reason to slow traffic down from the 65MPH limit to as little as 35MPH (creating big traffic backups) -- and in fact, most people elected to ignore the reduced speed demands because it was so clearly pointless. Still, a cop could easily decide to sit at any one of those work zones and issue BIG $ fines -- and drivers would have no recourse.
The whole "game" of cops trying to hide so they can catch a speeder is insulting, as well. If they're *really* doing all of this to "protect and serve" as their logo always claims -- wouldn't you think they'd want their police vehicle to be very clearly visible to all of the traffic? Certainly, you wouldn't use an *unmarked* car, where someone might not even be sure they were legitimately being pulled over!
4 or more countries top USA in executions in '11 (Score:3, Informative)
I won't speak to capital punishment rates, since in many US states capital punishment is a de facto life sentence.
However, America was no higher than 5th in executions per capita in 2011.
The United States carried out 43 of the world's 676 or more officially-acknowledged executions last year.
Some countries with higher totals:
* Iraq - 68
* Iran - 360 or more
* Saudi Arabia - 82
Some smaller countries with higher rates than America:
* Yemen - 41 or more executions
Source:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/news/death-penalty-2011-alarming-levels-executions-few-countries-kill-2012-03-27 [amnesty.org]
Re:Minnesota, eh. (Score:4, Informative)
And to top it all off, our food is bland, and a kid can't even take a porn star to the prom without an uproar. This state is whack.
Speak for yourself. My food is awesome. You're probably doing it wrong.