2100 to 1

No, those aren’t the odds that I’ll finish first in the NCAA tournament pool that I’ll neither confirm nor deny entering.  Well, actually, they might be.  I thought picking Texas to go to the finals might be a stroke of genius.  Not so much. Instead, 2100 to 1 is the average ratio that the concentration of alcohol in an individual’s blood bears to that in the person’s breath.  In North Carolina, a person’s alcohol concentration for purposes of an impaired driving offense may be stated either as grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood or grams of alcohol per 210 liters of breath. G.S. 20-4.01(1b). It is immaterial that this calculation is based only on an average blood to breath ratio and that it thus may overstate (in the case of an individual with a lower blood to breath ratio) or understate (in the case of an individual with a higher ratio) the person’s blood alcohol concentration.  See State v. Cothran, 120 N.C. App. 633, 635, 463 S.E.2d 423, 424 (1995). In Cothran, the defendant sought to introduce testimony from a chemist that the defendant’s blood to breath ratio was 1722 to 1, resulting in a breath test result 18 percent higher than his alcohol concentration. The appellate court upheld the trial court’s exclusion of this testimony, explaining that the legislature adopted a breath alcohol concentration per se offense as an alternative method of committing the offense of impaired driving.  Thus, the relationship of a defendant’s breath alcohol concentration to [...]