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 is In re Source Code Evidentiary Hearings in Implied Consent Matters, 816 N.W.2d 525 (Minn. 2012), and here is the backstory: In 2006, a driver charged with DWI in Minnesota filed a motion for discovery of the source code for the instrument used to test his breath, the Intoxilyzer 5000EN. (The breath testing instrument currently used in North Carolina is the Intoximeter, Model Intox EC/IR II.) After his motion was granted and the state’s challenges were rejected on appeal, discovery of Intoxilyzer source code became standard litigation strategy in criminal DWI and implied consent proceedings in Minnesota. (Discovery of source code has not been so liberally granted in other jurisdictions, as Jeff noted in this earlier post.) In light of the numerous discovery requests, Minnesota sought to have assigned to a single judge or panel of judges all pending and future implied consent cases, both civil and criminal, challenging the reliability of the Intoxilyzer 5000EN based on allegedly defective source code. The Minnesota supreme court assigned the cases to a single district court judge. Obtaining the source code was, of course, only the first step toward challenging the breath tests. Defendants and other petitioners (hereinafter “petititioners”) [...]
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