27,000 Massachusetts DUI Convictions Could Be Tossed

Issues with breathalyzer checks in Massachusetts may end in as many as 27,000 drunk driving convictions being overturned.

The Supreme Judicial Court docket (SJC) is scheduled to listen to arguments on December 7 in Commonwealth v. Lindsay Hallinan.

Commonwealth Journal reported that “The case is a capstone to seven years of litigation over the validity of breathalyzer checks and hinges on whether or not the misconduct of a state company that hid paperwork associated to the alcohol checks was egregious sufficient that it deserves the reopening of hundreds of responsible pleas and convictions.”

A decade in the past, an analogous scandal at a Massachusetts state lab resulted in hundreds of drug convictions being overturned.

Springfield lawyer Joseph Bernard, who has led the breathalyzer litigation, informed Commonwealth Journal the SJC ought to “do the appropriate factor” by giving the 27,000 drunk driving defendants “one other shot at a trial to revive confidence within the system.”

The Boston-based regulation agency DeGiacomo & Mikhlin, P.C. challenges the reliability of the Draeger Alcotest 9510 breathalyzer checks on the coronary heart of the controversy.

The agency’s web site Boston Mass DUI Lawyer.com states “The Draeger Alcotest 9510 can’t be trusted. This breath check machine might have resulted in hundreds of DUI convictions all through Massachusetts, which may have been averted had state police lab officers been sincere within the first place.”

Commonwealth Journal says a choose in Salem dominated in 2017 that “the check itself is correct, however the strategies utilized by the state’s Workplace of Alcohol Testing to certify the devices between 2011 and 2014 didn’t produce scientifically dependable outcomes.”