The State Rests: Challenge to Intoxilyzer 5000 Enters the Calm Before the Storm.

Posted On December 29, 2010 by Daniel Koewler

At the end of last week, the State finished presenting its evidence in support of the continued use of the Intoxilyzer 5000 to prosecute Minnesota drivers for DWI. All of the evidence has now been submitted to Judge Abrams; it is expected that he will issue an order in early 2011.

It was a long, hard road to get to this point, and far longer than it had to be - if the State had complied with our basic, standard discovery requests years ago, this challenge to the Intoxilyzer would have long since been finished. Instead, the State fought us tooth and nail the entire way: fellow members of the trial team have been to the Supreme Court not once, but twice, demanding access to the software that controls the Intoxilyzer. Our firm spent countless hours litigating the same issue in Federal Court, doing everything we could to ensure that we received actual access to the source code, rather than the sham settlement that was originally reached between the State and CMI.

Once the groundwork had been laid, we pulled together a truly impressive coalition of defense attorneys to help foot the enormous costs that go into a detailed review of an embedded system like the Intoxiliyzer. And now, finally, after years of preparation and litigation, the evidence we've been demanding for years has been presented in open court, and we've reached the calm before the storm.

We'll be filing our final written arguments by the end of January. Given the volumes of testimony presented, it's likely that Judge Abrams won't issue a final order until April of 2011. It's a waiting game now, with over 4,000 cases at stake, and we're optimistic about the outcome.