Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
People who are on high protein, low carbohydrate diets--
and really this can be Paleo Diet, the Atkins style
diet, the Perricone diet, the South Beach diet--
people who run these high protein, low carb diets often
times will produce false positives
or falsely high readings on DUI breath test machines.
And the reason is this.
When you're on one of these diets,
your body, when it doesn't have sufficient carbohydrates,
will begin to burn its own fat reserves for energy.
And this can be a great way to lose weight, for sure,
but it's a real problem in a DUI case.
Because when this happens, your body goes into a state
that we call ketosis, and you begin
to emit ketones on your breath.
Now, the breathalyzer machines mistake
ketones for ethyl alcohol, the sort of alcohol that we drink.
So consequently, somebody who is really a 0.05
could blow 0.15 on the breath machine.
And in fact, there's been plenty of documented cases where
somebody who had not drank any alcohol at all actually
registered on the machine as having alcohol in their system.
This is a problem that police officers and prosecutors
like to ignore because it's really their job to bust people
and convict people in an assembly-line fashion
without any problems or interruptions.
But this cannot be ignored because, the fact is,
it's causing innocent people to be wrongfully arrested
and wrongly convicted of DUI across the country.
So if you're in a situation where
you are on one of these low carb, high protein diets,
as many Americans are, and you are arrested for DUI,
and the amount of alcohol that you drank just
does not match up to what the machine is indicating,
there's sort of a disconnect between the drinking pattern
and the reading on the breathalyzer machine,
then we invite you to call us here at Shouse Law Group.
Tell us the facts of your situation.
We'll evaluate whether there's an effective defense that
can be used here to get your case reduced or dismissed.