Florida-The Intoxilyzer 8000 breathalyzers reliability called into question.

MANATEE COUNTY - Janet Landrum's 11th DUI arrest made her one of the area's most infamous repeat drunken drivers, but prosecutors dropped the case against her last week amid a battle over the state's alcohol breath-test machines.

Defense attorneys say the state dropped the case against the Manatee County woman in a last-ditch effort to protect the Intoxilyzer 8000 breath test as a key tool in prosecuting hundreds of other DUI cases in Sarasota and Manatee counties.

Rather than allow a judge to issue a written order that could be used to throw out all breath evidence in local DUI cases, State Attorney Earl Moreland's office dropped the charges on Landrum — despite having video and officer testimony of her erratic driving and her failure on roadside sobriety tests.

"I realized its implications on other cases," said Assistant State Attorney Brian Iten, a felony division chief.

Local defense attorneys say the dropped case is the beginning of the end for the Intoxilyzer 8000 in Sarasota and Manatee counties. They have copies of Brownell's comments in open court and believe they will be persuasive in having the breath evidence thrown out of county courtrooms.

"This is going to be filed across the board, in literally hundreds of cases," said Venice defense attorney Robert Harrison, who has led the fight to see the Intoxilyzer 8000 source code.

"Anybody that has taken the breath test on the Intoxilyzer 8000 could make this argument" — that the breath test is inadmissible, Harrison said.

Breath tests from the Intoxilyzer 8000, the state's only approved machine, have been under fire since 2005, when defense attorneys asked how the machine works. Judges have agreed the defendant deserves to inspect the computer code that runs it, but the manufacturer refuses to turn it over.

Moreland's office and the Kentucky-based manufacturer, CMI Inc., have been fighting the motions the entire time, saying the code is a trade secret. CMI took its appeal in Landrum's case all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.

Link:
http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20110510/ARTICLE/110519997/2416/NEWS?Title=A-monkey-wrench-in-DUI-prosecution