It is my opinion that, in the Treasure Coast, expert testimony in a DUI case does not provide a great deal of benefit to a client in a trial. Many of these experts have somewhat questionable credentials, have a clear profit motive in testifying, and usually provide scientific evidence that a intelligent, well informed jury panel will both be bored by and reject. (In contrast, practicing in Gainesville, Florida produced jury pools that were younger, idealistic, and frankly a bit less intelligent, but I've theorized that the less intelligent the juror, the more apt that juror may be to simply side with the intelligent sounding expert).
The exception to this rule, seems to be described today in an opinion handed down by Florida 2nd District Court of Appeals.
CMI, the company who created the "source code" or computer language of the Intoxilyzer 8000 (the old machine used by Florida law enforcement) and the Intoxilyzer 9000 (aka the new / current machine) has gone to great lengths to avoid having its source codes fall into the hands of criminal defense lawyers. While it is unclear whether CMI fights the disclosure based on a flaw in the code is still unclear, but Florida is an open discovery state, and if they expect to sell their machines here, it's clear that they should expect their machines to be scrutinized.
A jury may never hear from an expect regarding this source code, however the State is likely not to continue prosecuting cases when the source code is made an issue, if CMI continues to drag its feet on handng these codes over.
A copy of the opinion can be found here:
http://www.2dca.org/opinions/Opinion_Pages/Opinion_Page_2010/June/June%2018,%202010/2D09-5502.pdf
That's really great information. if somebody is getting caught for DUI 3 or more times, they are not mildly drunk, they are the swerving in and out of lanes, running red lights, seeing double level of drunk and that is why they are getting caught that many times, and those people need to be severely punished.
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