If you were convicted of drunken driving in the District in the past couple of years, you may not have been legally drunk after all.
Almost 400 people were convicted of drunken driving based on inaccurate results from breath test machines, reported the Washington Post. Half of those people went to jail.
D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said Wednesday that city police mistakenly set the baseline alcohol concentration levels. The machines would show a driver’s blood-alcohol content to be about 20 percent higher than it actually was.
Nickels sent a letter to the local trial lawyers association and the public defender’s service this month informing them of the situation.
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All 10 breath test machines used by district police were calibrated wrong between September 2008 and February 2010, according to a review by Nickels's office.
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