A UNC School of Government Blog
The North Carolina Court of Appeals decided its first breath-testing source code case yesterday. The court in State v. Marino affirmed the trial court’s determination that the defendant had no right to examine the source code for the Intoximeter EC IR II, the instrument used to analyze his breath alcohol concentration after he was arrested … Read more
A six-year battle in Minnesota regarding the reliability of breath test results in impaired driving cases in light of alleged defects in the testing instrument’s source code ended last summer. The State mostly won, though the Minnesota Supreme Court determined that machine-generated reports of a deficient breath sample were unreliable absent corroborating evidence. The case … Read more
Once again, my interest in criminal law and my interest in technology have come together in a brewing legal controversy. The issue is whether a DWI defendant who has submitted to a breath test for alcohol has a right to access the “source code” of the breath analysis machine. The Minnesota Supreme Court, in State … Read more