VANCOUVER—A team of Vancouver lawyers has imported the entire surplus stock of police breathalyzers from the state of Illinois to skirt a policy barring defence lawyers from obtaining the instruments from the manufacturer for examination. Vancouver lawyers intend to conduct experiments on roughly 150 breathalyzers imported from the U.S. to determine whether the instruments are as reliable as police and lawmakers claim. Those chemicals — known in terms of their effect on a breath-testing instrument as “interferents” — wind up in a worker’s bloodstream. “But we're going to actually experiment with (the instruments) using a simulator, and blowing those interferents through them,” Lee said. In particular, Lee said there is evidence which suggests the EC/IR 2 may falsely detect mouth alcohol that's not there, or miss detecting mouth alcohol when it is actually present.

Source: thestar March 24, 2019 21:45 UTC