The impact of faulty data from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s blood alcohol testing equipment continues to widen, but drunken driving arrests continued without issue over the weekend in Minnesota.
On Friday, the BCA ordered DataMaster use suspended “until agencies verify the gas cylinder data is correctly entered into each instrument.”
At a news conference Monday, BCA Superintendent Drew Evans said the machines were never fully taken offline and all it required was a five-minute check to make sure everything was operating correctly.
Evans said there are currently 276 tests identified that might be affected. Each of those is being considered individually, and the number of faulty tests might grow.
Law enforcement officials typically handle such cases by having an officer conduct a preliminary breath test to register blood alcohol content after pulling someone over for probable cause drunk driving. If a driver refuses the test, they can be arrested. If they agree to the test, the officer can use the preliminary breath test, along with roadside tests, to move forward with arrest and bring the suspect in for more testing. That preliminary breath test data is not used in court because it isn’t accurate enough; it’s just another tool law enforcement has to detain someone and do further testing.
Every breath test for blood alcohol concentration that’s used in court in Minnesota is done on a DataMaster machine. They are used by every county, and there are 220 of them in the state. The instrument has a dry gas cylinder with a known alcohol concentration that is used as a control to make sure the alcohol reading off the breath test is correct. The machine is used repeatedly with the same gas cylinder and is typically sent back for maintenance and recertified annually before being put back in the field.
The current problem stems from law enforcement officials either putting a gas cylinder that’s for preliminary breath test machines into the DataMaster machines or putting the cylinder in incorrectly.
