At DUIBlog, a very telling post about one lawyer’s efforts to learn the secrets of a little black box that puts people in jail. Most lawyers and judges (and let us not forget those merry lawmakers) understand little about the science behind criminal law. While we may read up on the background literature, the fact remains that we are not engineers or nuclear physicists, and all that stuff is as incomprehensible to us as it is to everyone else. Sure, we mouth the jargon as if we know something, but we haven’t a clue.
And the funny part about it is, neither does anyone else in the courtroom. We all pretend otherwise, but the truth is that the witnesses (whether cop or expert) are just making noise about how things work and why they are valid. And not being experts ourselves, there’s little that we can do to stop them. Most of the time.
But there’s a lawyer in Minnesota named Jeffrey Sheridan who has decided that he’s had it. The little black box, affectionately known as the “breathalyzer”, tells us whether a driver has a blood alcohol content in excess of a tiny number that some legislator decided was the difference between going to jail and going home to sleep it off.
How does that little black box do it? I don’t know. Jeffrey doesn’t know. The judges of the Minnesota Supreme Court don’t know. And yet this pervasive ignorance hasn’t stopped anyone from locking people up because of it. That’s some powerful box.
Jeffrey has obtained a ruling allowing him to get the “source code” for some antiquated chip that makes the black box buzz. “Among other things, for example, their operation and computation of blood alcohol levels is controlled by an old Z-80 microprocessor — an historical antique that used to drive the original Pong computer game.” A Z-80 microprocessor? That sure sounds like an antique to me. I would have thought it would be a Z-97 microprocessor by now. Or maybe even a Z-342. There are so many numbers to chose from. But I remember pong. It’s such a quaint game.
The company that makes the breathalyzer, from Kentucky, won’t give up the source code. They say it’s proprietary. I guess all the other breathalyzer wannabe companies are dying to get their hands on the code that drives the pong chip. You can’t be too careful with your source code.
Now I don’t know exactly what a source code is, or how Jeffrey is going to gain a fuller insight into the accuracy or failing of the breathalyzer by having the source code. But I am willing to assume that he’s got his reasons. The fact that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in his favor after a full exploration of the matter tends to support his purpose, and the fact that the Kentucky company isn’t giving it up makes it even more imperative.
According to the Jeffrey Sheridan, however, while the Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered the state to hand it over, the state doesn’t have it and the company (not a party to the proceeding) isn’t about to do so. When will he get that source code in his grubby little lawyer hands? “I guess the answer is probably never.”
And so the Minnesota Supreme Court has forbidden the use of the breathalyzer until the source code is provided, competently and properly tested and shown to be legally adequate to put men and women in jail! And other states have fallen right in line, acknowledging for years that they have accepted the accuracy of this silly little box as a substitute for evidence and locked away their citizens day after day without having the slightest clue whether it is sufficiently scientifically reliable! And the jails have flung their doors open, apologizing to the thousand and thousand of people who were convicted upon the proof of nothing more than a little black box that nobody really knows what it does!
Oh, come on. Next week, how does someone know that he has 0.08% BAC rather than 0.07% so that he possesses the mens rea to commit a crime.
And the funny part about it is, neither does anyone else in the courtroom. We all pretend otherwise, but the truth is that the witnesses (whether cop or expert) are just making noise about how things work and why they are valid. And not being experts ourselves, there’s little that we can do to stop them. Most of the time.
But there’s a lawyer in Minnesota named Jeffrey Sheridan who has decided that he’s had it. The little black box, affectionately known as the “breathalyzer”, tells us whether a driver has a blood alcohol content in excess of a tiny number that some legislator decided was the difference between going to jail and going home to sleep it off.
How does that little black box do it? I don’t know. Jeffrey doesn’t know. The judges of the Minnesota Supreme Court don’t know. And yet this pervasive ignorance hasn’t stopped anyone from locking people up because of it. That’s some powerful box.
Jeffrey has obtained a ruling allowing him to get the “source code” for some antiquated chip that makes the black box buzz. “Among other things, for example, their operation and computation of blood alcohol levels is controlled by an old Z-80 microprocessor — an historical antique that used to drive the original Pong computer game.” A Z-80 microprocessor? That sure sounds like an antique to me. I would have thought it would be a Z-97 microprocessor by now. Or maybe even a Z-342. There are so many numbers to chose from. But I remember pong. It’s such a quaint game.
The company that makes the breathalyzer, from Kentucky, won’t give up the source code. They say it’s proprietary. I guess all the other breathalyzer wannabe companies are dying to get their hands on the code that drives the pong chip. You can’t be too careful with your source code.
Now I don’t know exactly what a source code is, or how Jeffrey is going to gain a fuller insight into the accuracy or failing of the breathalyzer by having the source code. But I am willing to assume that he’s got his reasons. The fact that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in his favor after a full exploration of the matter tends to support his purpose, and the fact that the Kentucky company isn’t giving it up makes it even more imperative.
According to the Jeffrey Sheridan, however, while the Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered the state to hand it over, the state doesn’t have it and the company (not a party to the proceeding) isn’t about to do so. When will he get that source code in his grubby little lawyer hands? “I guess the answer is probably never.”
And so the Minnesota Supreme Court has forbidden the use of the breathalyzer until the source code is provided, competently and properly tested and shown to be legally adequate to put men and women in jail! And other states have fallen right in line, acknowledging for years that they have accepted the accuracy of this silly little box as a substitute for evidence and locked away their citizens day after day without having the slightest clue whether it is sufficiently scientifically reliable! And the jails have flung their doors open, apologizing to the thousand and thousand of people who were convicted upon the proof of nothing more than a little black box that nobody really knows what it does!
Oh, come on. Next week, how does someone know that he has 0.08% BAC rather than 0.07% so that he possesses the mens rea to commit a crime.
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Source code: The set of instructions permanently encoded on that Z-80 chip that turns sensor data into that printout which sends people to jail. Probably written with a series of assumptions that have no basis in reality.
Good enough explanation for attorneys?