http://www.pennlive.com – With evident frustration, Lebanon County’s judges have issued a decision that a defense expert says could result in the dismissal of hundreds, and perhaps more than 1,000, drunken driving cases in the county.
District Attorney David Arnold said today that he is sure the decision won’t hinder the prosecution of DUI cases or lead to any mass dismissals, however.
The judges’ ruling calls into question the accuracy of blood testing evidence from Good Samaritan Hospital that has been used to prosecute local drunken driving cases for years.
The court stated that it won’t accept evidence from blood tests conducted at Good Samaritan in DUI cases unless that testing is done in strict conformance with the operating instructions for the hospital’s blood testing machine.
That hasn’t been done, the county’s four judges noted in an opinion issued Friday by Judge Bradford H. Charles, a former district attorney.
Justin McShane, a midstate DUI defense specialist, said the court’s decision should force the dismissal of most pending drunken driving cases in Lebanon County because the blood evidence will no longer be admissible at trial.
“It’ll get rid of all the blood-based cases. That’s 80 percent of them,” McShane said today. “Certainly we’re talking about not less than 500 cases, maybe up to 1,300 cases.”
But Arnold said he sees little, if any, impact from the court’s decision. “”We’re pretty firmly convinced that it will not impact any prior convictions, nor will it impact any future cases,” he said.
His office is still reviewing the ruling, Arnold said, and if necessary could call technical experts to give testimony supporting the accuracy of the Good Samaritan evidence.
Interestingly, the court took its stand on the hospital’s blood evidence in deciding not to weigh a motion filed by Arnold’s office.
The accuracy of Good Samaritan blood test evidence has been at issue for years; as many as five years, according to McShane. The district attorney’s office wanted the judges to consider eight unrelated DUI cases as a block and “approve the viability of the blood alcohol testing process” conducted at the hospital.
The judges found that for legal reasons, they couldn’t honor the DA’s request to deal with so many cases at once.
However, they did take on the issue of whether the Good Samaritan blood test results should be admissible in court.
The judges concluded that those test results are questionable because the tests are being conducted by a process that does not strictly adhere to the specifications set by the operating manual for the hospital’s Siemens Dade Dimension blood testing machine.
“All we declare…is that if (the hospital) or the Lebanon County District Attorney’s Office wishes to utilize a (blood-alcohol) test result using the Siemens Dade Dimension machine to convict a criminal defendant, then it must show that the…machine was employed in accordance with its designed specifications,” Charles wrote.
“This is not a decision about which we will compromise,” he added.
The judges also made a plea for one side or the other in the blood testing dispute to appeal a county case to the state Superior Court to get a ruling that will finally resolve the battle.
Blood alcohol testing “has been a problem in Lebanon County for several years,” Charles wrote. “We conclude that the commonwealth now has the necessary tools to fix this problem and we urge it to do so sooner than later.”
McShane, whose associate Tim Barrouk was involved in the Lebanon County battle, said his next step is to seek dismissal of the 10 to 20 cases his firm has that are affected by the court’s ruling. Other defense attorneys and DUI defendants who are representing themselves will have to do the same, he said.
The ruling by the judges won’t have an impact outside Lebanon County because the dispute over testing done at Good Samaritan is strictly a local issue, McShane said.
That ruling is the second DUI-related court decision issued by a midstate court in less than two months to impact drunken driving prosecutions.
In late December, Dauphin County Judge Lawrence F. Clark Jr. issued an opinion invalidating the use of breathalyzer machine evidence in high-rate DUI cases. A colleague, Judge Scott A. Evans, issued an oral ruling to the same effect.
Clark’s decision could have a statewide impact based on the outcome of an appeal the Dauphin County District Attorney’s office filed last month with the Superior Court.
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