Those who are in power have always loathed and feared others who have the ability to challenge them philosophically or scientifically.
Jesus is an early historical example of this idea. He was openly critical of Palestine’s Roman rulers and accused the ruling class of hypocrisy and injustice. To the ruling class Jesus was a pariah. For these reasons, among others, he could not be tolerated.
Ironically, long after Christ it was the Catholic Church who made pariahs out of Galileo and Copernicus; men whose scientific teachings challenged their authority.
Today, men and women in power are invested in the philosophy that drinking and driving is evil, and so today the same type of disdain is foisted upon a different kind of scientist, those that go by the title “defense expert” in a drunk driving case.
In other words, according to the State those men and women who have the temerity to suggest that breath and blood testing are at times unreliable and potentially produce flawed results must be silenced. And it seems the State still finds the age-old tools of shame and “excommunication” to be the most useful means to encourage this silence.
Here is what one prominent DUI defense expert has to say about her experience in and out of the court room:
I have been called a whore for what I do for a living and accused of lying just to get someone off in court. I’ve had prosecutors and state experts verbally attack me for doing my job.
Most attacks are made outside of the courtroom and not in front of the juries. The attacks in court are more subtle, such as “so you’re here today because you were paid to testify for this person?” “And just how much are you being paid to testify for them?” “You only testify for the defense, isn’t that correct?”
These types of attacks are generally easy to deal with by stating I am paid for my expertise and that includes testimony if needed. I especially enjoy when I can state that I reject more cases than I accept.
More pointed attacks are dredging up partial truths about why I left the state employment and twisting them to try and make me look bad. It’s been 15 years since I left state employment and they still want to claim I am a disgruntled ex employee with an ax to grind against the state and that is why I am doing this for a living.
My explanation to the jury is that I could no longer work for an agency that hid unfavorable information and asked me to tailor my answers to prosecutor’s questions about breath testing to make things sound better and more scientific than they really were.
I was paid when I testified for the state; it was part of my job. But I lost respect for the state’s attorneys when I found that they didn’t want to hear the whole truth.
The prosecutors didn’t care about scientific truth; they only cared about convictions, and about making their own trial records look good. Their main objective was to use my testimony to provide answers that made the person look guilty and to falsely make breath testing look infallible.
What finally caused my job with the state to become untenable was when I refused to disregard subpoenas from the defense attorneys in DUI cases. I actually had the gall to give them everything they asked for in an open records request, even the stuff that was unfavorable to the state. This was information the state did not want known because it made some drunk driving convictions difficult to accomplish. This information revealed State secrets and inconvient truths.
Nevertheless, today I would gladly help any state agency that wants to improve their program, but would expect to be paid for my expertise and consulting.
So who are the people the state is relying on as experts? What are they paid to do? Do they testify for the defense when subpoenaed? Do they turn over the documentation requested? Do they believe in innocence until proven guilty?
Do they believe that the breath tests are ever wrong when the test record shows a numeric value for the person being tested? On the last four questions a “no” answer means they are biased – which they clearly are.
Considering it is the prosecutors in DUI cases that are calling the defense experts “whores” it is interesting to note that the word “prosecutor” comes from the Hebrew ha-Satan which means ‘the accuser,” and the word “prosecutor” may derive from a Northwest Semitic root meaning “to be hostile” or “to accuse.”
If you are facing a Michigan drunk driving case with breath or blood evidence contact the Barone Defense Firm today for your FREE consultation.
