Washington, DC: Breathalyzer calibration results are being questioned as far back as ten years.

WASHINGTON - A man hired to supervise the Breathalyzer unit of the D.C. police department is blowing the whistle on what he says are a decade of questionable test results.

Writing in a memo to the D.C. Attorney General he said the officers running the program rarely, if ever, performed accuracy tests on the machines used to measure the blood-alcohol content of drivers suspected of DUI.

Two and a half months after taking over the Breath Alcohol Testing Program, Ilmar Paegle, a retired U.S. Park Police officer, wrote a detailed four page memo in which he claims the protocol to ensure the machines were properly calibrated has not been followed since at least 2000. That’s a claim the D.C. Attorney General Office calls just an "opinion."

Motorists in Washington, DC may have been falsely accused of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI) for more than a decade as a result of faulty "Intoxilyzer" breath testing equipment. Whistleblower Ilmar Paegle, a veteran police officer now working as a contract employee for the District Department of Transportation, argued in a memorandum to the city's attorney general that the breath testing machines have not been properly calibrated since 2000.


Links:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2010/dc-baddui.pdf
http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/local/dc-breathalyzer-calibration-questioned-121410