Washington, DC- 1,400 drunk driving cases are called into question using breath analyzers that are found in most police departments nationwide.

The District's attorney general Irvin Nathan has dropped dozens of drunken driving cases since Jan. 31 and hundreds of others could be dropped as the police department shuts down its troubled alcohol breath-test program. Problems dating back more than three years with the city's breath analyzers were first revealed in February 2010, when it was discovered the machines' results were inaccurate. Since then, the D.C. medical examiner's office has refused to sign off on the accuracy tests of new analysis machines, officials said.

"The alcohol breath-analysis program? It doesn't exist anymore," said Ilmar Paegle, who discovered problems with the Intoxilyzer 5000s soon after he took over the city's breath-analysis program on Feb. 1, 2010. Paegle's contract ended last week. As he left, he said, the police department pulled off the street the Intoximeter, which replaced the Intoxilyzer last spring. "It's a royal mess," Paegle said.

The Washington Examiner reported this week that Nathan has been dropping drunken-driving cases in recent weeks, citing problems with the police department's breath analyzers, whose results have been unusable as courtroom evidence since it was revealed in February 2010 that they were inaccurate. Defense attorneys say they believe the attorney general is dropping the cases because he doesn't want to reveal the history of an investigation into two police officers who are responsible for a third of the city's 1,400 drunken-driving arrests each year. A review by The Examiner of 25 dropped cases showed the officers made the arrests in all of them. They are the subjects of an internal affairs investigation that began after they spoke out about problems with the breath analyzers


Link:http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/dc/2011/02/dcs-attorney-general-face-grilling-over-dropped-drunk-driving-cases