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-When somebody gets arrested for DUI and they give blood,
and the result comes back above the .08 limit, lot of
times they feel like the case is over.
It's just open-and-shut, and there's nothing they can do.
But the fact is, a lot of these cases are still
defensible.
I worked as a prosecutor for five years, and now for nine
years as a defense attorney, and I've worked on literally
about 7,000 DUI cases.
And I can tell you from experience that a lot of
times, it's possible to challenge and attack these
blood test results.
And really, there's five things to look at, or five
ways to attack a DUI blood case.
The first is in the initial collection of the blood,
because a lot of times, it's improperly collected by the
nurse or the phlebotomist.
Secondly, we find that a lot of times, they fail to use the
proper amount of preservative and anticoagulant in the vial
in which they collect the blood.
And when that happens, it's very easy for the blood to
ferment and for it to produce its own alcohol.
And obviously, then, when it's tested, it's going to be a
higher result than what the person's true BAC was.
Thirdly, there's what we call chain of custody issues, and
that is that police and crime labs and people in evidence
lockers tend to be very sloppy in how they store and mark and
inventory blood results.
And it's not uncommon for samples to be switched.
We see it in the movies, but the reality is it happens not
uncommonly in real life.
Fourth, we find that a lot of times, the chemists who do the
blood analysis do it wrong.
And one of things that we do, here at Shouse Law Group, in
every DUI case that we handle, in which there was a blood
test, is we do what's called a blood split.
And that is when the police collect the blood, they send a
portion of it to the crime lab to be analyzed.
But we get the remaining portion, and we have it
retested in an independent laboratory.
And a lot of times, we get a different result.
And we find that they original analyst at the
crime lab did it wrong.
And when that's the situation, frequently we can get the
evidence excluded from court and get the case
dismissed that way.
Finally, even in a situation where the police and the crime
lab do everything right, and the blood test comes back
above the limit, that doesn't mean that that's what the
client's BAC was at the time of driving.
Because when you drink alcohol, it can take hours for
that alcohol to absorb into your bloodstream.
And as the alcohol's absorbed, your BAC is going up.
So if the police take your blood sample, and let's say it
comes back a 0.11--
it may have been that an hour earlier, your BAC was a 0.07,
at the time that you were actually behind the wheel.
And that's the only thing that counts for legal purposes.
So quite often, in these cases, we find that blood was
improperly collected, that there wasn't the proper amount
of preservative and anticoagulant, that it wasn't
properly stored and inventoried and could well
have been mixed up, that it was improperly analyzed, and
that even if it is above the limit, it doesn't necessarily
mean that that was what our client's BAC was at the time
of driving.
So if you've been arrested for DUI and you have a blood test
that came back above the limit, we would encourage you,
never just go in and assume you're
guilty and plead guilty.
Let a good defense lawyer take a look at your case.
Many times, it's possible to get
these reduced or dismissed.