Mr. Broussard recounts a conversation with a police officer:
I was speaking with a state trooper friend of mine at court the other day about different breath testing devices. We started talking about recent news reports of a flashlight, which also contained a device for detecting alcohol and the inherent problems with such a device.
When this trained police officer stated, “It’s not infallible like the Intoxilyzer 5000.” Even though I knew that some officers say this, and CMI, (the manufacturer of the Intoxilyzer), thinks the Intoxilyzer 5000 is God’s gift to law enforcement, I was still blown away (pun intended) by this troopers sincerity.
He actually believed this statement.
Unfortunately, many judges in this state believe the same as the trooper. It is incumbent upon us as defense attorneys to challenge this erroneous assumption and offer facts, which will provide judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers, with realistic limitations of this machine.
This article will attempt to point out some of those limitations.
In his article, Broussard outlines several key arguments that exemplify weaknesses of the Intoxilyzer 5000. The link the entire article is below.
Among several enlightening observations, Broussard states the following:
Accuracy is like trying to hit the center of a bull’s eye. It is the ability of the machine or method to provide a result as close to the true value as possible. Precision, on the other hand, is associated with the repeatability or results from analysis of the same sample. Is there clustering of the “hits” on the target or are they scattered? It is possible to have good precision without having good accuracy.
Thus, simply repeating a measurement does not insure accuracy.
Read the whole article here.
