Challenging Urine Tests

When you are arrested for drunk driving, your arraignment will be set in the Municipal Court within one to two weeks. This is not designed to force you to resolve your case. It is designed to make sure people hire their lawyer and to get the case scheduled. In fact, if you have not hired an attorney by the time you are arraigned, the judge will instruct you to hire counsel before the next court date. Hiring a lawyer early is extremely important because you only have 10 days in which to file an appeal to keep your driver's license.

Unless you send a 10 Day Letter, your license will be suspended for a year. An early arraignment is just a reminder to get serious about your case and get the best defense. There are three chemical tests used by law enforcement to determine a driver's blood alcohol content: urine, breath, and blood. The urine test is considered to be quite unreliable as there are many ways it can be faulty. Urine tests are dependent on the person that is administering the test's competency. If the officer is not properly trained to perform the test, or does not follow proper procedures, the test results are unreliable.

Most people do not know the concentration of alcohol in urine is 1.33 times the alcohol concentration in the blood. This makes results of urine tests look inflated. Urine tests are typically utilized to test whether a driver has taken drugs at all. According to a study done by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, twenty percent of the labs surveyed had wrongly reported that illegal substances were discovered in urine samples that were actually completely free of illegal substances. This is because many illegal substances have similar chemical compounds to other substances which are legal.

For example, if you have are sick and are taking a non-drowsy cold medicine, amphetamines may be found in your system. If you are taking Ibuprofen, marijuana may be found in your results. it is even possible to fail a drug test by eating a bagel with poppy seeds! One other issue with urine tests is that it does not have the ability to determine when the illegal substance was consumed. A urine test can find traces of a substance that had been used weeks prior and no longer affecting the user. This means that a driver can be pulled over on a Thursday night and test positive for drugs he consumed on Saturday even though that drug has no effect on his driving ability.