MN Supreme Court issues ruling on breathalyzer tests

The Minnesota Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case that could change how drunk driving is enforced in our state. We know they have done that, in fact. Bill Keller is joining us now with more on what the court is being asked to decide here. And you have breaking news, but let's first get into what... What's that issue? Yeah, the center is around the steps that law enforcement has to take before they can use the results of a breathalyzer test. There's a pretty lengthy process for pulling over a drunk driver. You can smell alcohol, you can observe the way they've been driving, weaving. You can do field sobriety tests. Sometimes people are taken in, given an actual blood draw for their blood alcohol. But the breathalyzer question is actually, this is an anomaly that I've never heard of before. So it's kind of fascinating. It's not complicated, but it is nuanced. There is a condition where basically you've got... The contents of your stomach, which includes alcohol, gets metabolized and it goes into your blood. And we know that 0.08 is considered above the legal limit to drive. But if you're ready to blow into a breathalyzer and you let one of these go, you've now taken what's in your stomach, which is, they say, 2,000 times more concentrated than your air. Than what's in your lungs. Correct. It would manipulate, it could skew the breathalyzer results. So this is a... A tactic that a lot of defense attorneys have used, they want to document, has the police officer taken the necessary steps before administering a breathalyzer? And the step is observing you for 15 minutes. Does he burp? Does he regurgitate? Does he whatever? So this was basically one individual who tried to get out of a drunk driving. In fact, the lower court ruled, hey, that's a good point. There was evidence that, you know, they could sit you down here and say, Tom, sit here tight. I'm going to be right back and come back. Well, you can see, smell. So the nuance here is, did you look at this person for 15 minutes before you give them the breath test? A lower court said, yeah, you got a good point throughout the case. It was appealed. This was happening more and more often. This was a good little loophole for defense attorneys. Sure. And the State Attorney General said, we're gonna appeal this. So that's what the justices were deciding. Any predictions? I'm going to say they ruled against it. Nothing has essentially changed. The question was, should those breath results be admissible in court for a drunk driving case? And so that's what the justices were basically deciding, and they basically, look, we've got a statement, and it just kind of summarizes it up. If you could pull that up, we'll read it for you, and it kind of explains what the factor is here. They say, we now clarify the proper standard. An imperfect observation period is not per se a reason to exclude a breath test result. Rather, the risk that a breath sample was contaminated. Could support a district court determination that a breath test was taken from the sample that was inadmissible. What they're basically saying is, this is not an umbrella blanket. Unless if you can't prove that they watched you for 15 minutes, the breath test does not count. But what they did say is, it is an argument to be made, and we're gonna let the lower courts decide that on a case-by-case basis. So we're not gonna blanket throw these out, and we're not gonna blanket greenlight them. But basically, it'll be admissible in court, and you'll have to figure out a very strong way to get around that result. And you wonder if some of the, Some municipalities, some of the police departments have caught wind of this and now are saying we're going to timestamp this. Sure. And they've got a lot of evidence. And they've got all that, typically. Yeah, they've got... They've got, you know, dash cam and body cam and it's just, this would have been a landmark decision had they flipped the other way and said, okay, breathalyzers now have to have a very stringent criteria. So essentially, drive safely and mind your P's and Q's. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's where we have safe drivers. We have designated drivers in Uber and that type of thing. Bill, thank you. Thank you. You bet.