The above is Part Four from a lec­ture given by Attor­ney Justin J. McShane before the North Car­olina Advo­cates for Jus­tice “Advanced DWI Sem­i­nar”. This sem­i­nar hap­pened on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2010. It was orga­nized and hosted by John K. Fan­ney, Esquire of Fan­ney & Jack­son, P.C. The fol­low­ing is a tran­script of this video:

Now, this is a micro­scope.  In fact it’s called a stere­omi­cro­scope. Believe it or not in most states it is how they come to this con­clu­sion. That the green leafy sub­stance is in fact marijuana.

Let’s think about that for a minute. How many peo­ple here have ever defended a mar­i­juana case?  I imag­ine most peo­ple, right? You get back the lab report that says one sen­tence, “Hey, it’s mar­i­juana — your guy’s done.” Does any­one have the SOP (Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure) to fig­ure out what sort of ana­lyt­i­cal test­ing they are doing in order to deter­mine that it is in fact mar­i­juana to the exclu­sion of all other green leafy sub­stances? Anyone?

Think about this — more than likely what they are doing in your state, even in the state lab, I don’t know if you have local labs around here, what they are doing is stere­omi­croscopy.  What stere­omi­croscopy is, is basi­cally they are tak­ing a look under the micro­scope at a rel­a­tively low power, usu­ally about 20x or 25x, and they are look­ing for char­ac­ter­is­tics that they believe to be con­sis­tent with mar­i­juana and noth­ing else.  And so the bot­tom line of it is, if you think about it is “I have trained eye balls, my eye balls are bet­ter than yours.  And because I take a look at this green leafy sub­stance and specif­i­cally when we zoom in and we take a look at it…”  What they are specif­i­cally look­ing for is called cys­tolithic hairs that react to duquenoid or acid and they cre­ate bubbling.

That is totally sub­jec­tive.  There is a paucity of stud­ies out there if there are any at all that would be able to deter­mine whether or not to the exclu­sion of all other types of plants on the planet Earth that only mar­i­juana, and only mar­i­juana has cys­tolithic hairs that reacts to chem­i­cal process by bub­bling. There is no study out there.  So if your state is doing botanical-based, that’s what it’s called – botanical-based stere­omi­croscopy — that’s a very big prob­lem because it’s sub­jec­tive, it’s not empir­i­cal and so you have to be aware of that.

What’s worse is even in my state, Penn­syl­va­nia, they do what is called polar­ized light microscopy. This one is even fun­nier, and it’s for cocaine. They flu­o­resce it under the micro­scope and if they see twin­kling in this type of fash­ion under that micro­scope it’s got to be cocaine. That’s the busi­ness that is going on out there. We don’t know about it because we’re not exposed to it. You need to expose it in front of a jury and show what it is, it is not sci­ence, it is not foren­sic in nature but it is sub­jec­tive in nature.

There is bet­ter test­ing out there such as GCMS (Gas Chro­matog­ra­phy Mass Spec­trom­e­try) that will sci­en­tif­i­cally get rid of this “I have a great set of eye balls” type of busi­ness that goes on in state labs. So you have to be aware of those issues and types of things that are out there because if you rely upon “my trained set of eye balls, my high-grade, trained set of eye balls,” can any­one tell me just by look­ing, not from your own per­sonal expe­ri­ence; just by look­ing and what you have seen on the inter­net or some­thing like that, which one is mar­i­juana, which one is not mar­i­juana?  Or trick ques­tion — is there mar­i­juana up there?

The rea­son why you can’t do this whole hocus pocus of “I can tell by look­ing at it” type of thing is because you can have a lot of inno­cent things that look anal­o­gous to it.  And these are nice exam­ples because you get the whole leaf, most of the time, if you ever look at the evi­dence it’s not these nice pretty leafs.  It’s usu­ally the bud mate­ri­als and things like that, it’s ground up and every­thing like that, you don’t get the whole leafs.  But the bot­tom line is on the left is the Japan­ese maple leaf, and on the right is our pot leaf.  So you have to not accept when they come in with these botan­i­cal based con­clu­sion, espe­cially when it comes to seeds because of course, at least in my state — I did not do the research in your state — it’s the THC is what makes it ille­gal as opposed to hemp or deac­ti­vated. How you can tell a seed is going to ger­mi­nate in order to pro­duce THC by look­ing at a seed is about the most ridicu­lous thing in the world. That is the most ridicu­lous thing in the world.  So you have to be exposed and you have to know these things in order to be on the look­out for them, and its pat­tern recog­ni­tion which is just gen­er­ally junk.

We’re talk­ing about foren­sic ver­sus non-forensic test­ing and the big dis­tinc­tion there and why is it impor­tant. Non-forensic test­ing is stuff that doesn’t belong in a court­room. Foren­sic test­ing belongs in a court­room only if done prop­erly — pretty big dis­tinc­tion. Non-orensic test­ing is like this type of stuff that we had up here, the col­ori­met­ric related tests that have false pos­i­tives. That does not belong in a courtroom.

I want to talk to you about one that’s near and dear to my heart and now we’re going to start talk­ing about blood test­ing.  It’s hos­pi­tal blood test­ing. I’m on a cru­sade to end enzy­matic assay, or what is called hos­pi­tal blood test­ing in the United States.  For deter­mi­na­tion of a Blood Alco­hol Con­tent.  And I am going to show you why it is so par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous in terms of false pos­i­tive rates, its non-selectivity and prob­lems that exist with it.

By way of anal­ogy, there are two ways… I have a daugh­ter. She’s six­teen months old.  She’s gor­geous.  She’s the light of my life, I just absolutely love her.  She runs around, tod­dles around and does all fun things that a six­teen month old does. There are two ways to weigh my daugh­ter.  The first way is I take my daugh­ter, get out the scale, and I put her on the scale and I see what the scale says. That’s called a direct mea­sure. The other way to do it is I weigh 203 lbs; my daugh­ter, because I did the direct mea­sure­ment of the scale, is 23 lbs. The sec­ond way of doing it is I get on the scale with her on it after I know that I am 203 lbs.

Let me restate that a lit­tle bit eas­ier. The first way you can do it is you put out the scale and you put her on it, and it says 23 lbs — direct mea­sure­ment, noth­ing inter­feres.  It’s a direct mass mea­sure that’s there.  You take her off. The sec­ond way of doing it is if I hop on the scale first, I see that I am 203 lbs.  I step off the scale.  I go grab the tod­dler and she’s wig­gling and every­thing like that, then I go step on the scale again and it says 226 lbs. Then what I do is I take the 226 of the both of us, sub­tract the 203 of the known — that is me.  That comes up with 23 lbs.

What ends up hap­pen­ing that sec­ond way, if I do it that sec­ond way, the indi­rect mea­sure way what ends up hap­pen­ing is my wife looks at me like I’m stu­pid and says “Why on Earth did you weigh our daugh­ter that way?  Why didn’t you just put her on a scale?”  And that is pre­cisely what is hap­pen­ing in hos­pi­tal blood cases. They are not mea­sur­ing ETOH or drink­ing alco­hol, They are not mea­sur­ing that at all.  What they are doing is called an indi­rect enzy­matic assay test­ing, and I am going to explain every sin­gle one of those words.  But the rea­son why you have to be aware of it is because in trauma-related cases where you have some­one who is a drink­ing dri­ver or accused of drink­ing and dri­ving shows up in a hos­pi­tal, that is where you’ll see it most of the time.  And then they pull, as part of their med­ical course of treat­ment, dif­fer­ent blood tubes at the end of the day.

What you have to do is you have to think about the envi­ron­ment that it is in. The envi­ron­ment that it’s in is not a foren­sic envi­ron­ment.  It’s not run by sci­en­tists.  It’s run by clin­i­cians — peo­ple who are look­ing to do “stat, imme­di­ately, now” treat some­one with an acute prob­lem. So it’s fast and it’s dirty and you can’t run a GC type of test or Gas Chro­matog­ra­phy type of test because that takes sev­eral hours.  By that point in time the per­son is either dead, treated, or stabilized.

So instead what exists out there is hos­pi­tal blood test­ing because it’s fast. This type of test­ing is also fast but it’s not accu­rate as we saw here.  It is not pre­cise.  It’s not selec­tive and it does not test for mar­i­juana to the exclu­sion of all other things. That is the prob­lem with hos­pi­tal blood test­ing. It’s help­ful in a clin­i­cal envi­ron­ment of an emer­gency room. It’s dis­as­ter in a courtroom.

The above is Part Three from a lec­ture given by Attor­ney Justin J. McShane before the North Car­olina Advo­cates for Jus­tice “Advanced DWI Sem­i­nar”. This sem­i­nar hap­pened on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2010. It was orga­nized and hosted by John K. Fan­ney, Esquire of Fan­ney & Jack­son, P.C. The fol­low­ing is a tran­script of this video:

What we’re going to do, because it is early in the morn­ing and I hate early in the morn­ing… But I love my cof­fee. I am going to need some vol­un­teers and I am actu­ally going to pick them because I am usu­ally the per­son in the seat who hates to be both­ered this early in the morn­ing. I am going to pick you, and you look­ing down, try­ing not to be picked. Come on up. What we have here is the most pop­u­lar form of reagent based test­ing that is done on the street. This is called the NIK Pub­lic Safety, the Nar­cotics Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Sys­tem. Doesn’t it sound really won­der­ful? It is a col­ori­met­ric test; this is what they do when they stop some­one on the side of the road. I am going to ask you to do this. This is just cof­fee from my room. Would you do me a favor? Would you raise your right hand? Repeat after me; I am going to put you under oath. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and noth­ing but the truth, so help you God?

Female: I do.

Are you, right now under the penalty of per­jury, are you in pos­ses­sion of mar­i­juana? Are you?

Male: I would say that I do not think I am in pos­ses­sion of it.

Alright, lawyer.

Female: Not that I am aware of.

Not that you are aware of, okay. Is it mar­i­juana? Take a look at it. It just came right out of this pack­age, you saw me open it. Is it marijuana?

Female: No.

Male: No.

Alright. What I am going to do here is take this kit, and it is a color based reagent test kit, it is based upon three ampoules and the way that dif­fer­ent things that are there. What we’re going to do is fol­low the exact direc­tions that are there. As you can see, there is noth­ing in here what­so­ever. And I am just going to get some air intro­duced in there, I am going to flap the darn thing over, I am going to fol­low the direc­tions on the thing that’s here. Why don’t you do me a favor. Why don’t read out loud the direc­tions that are right there so that every­one can see that I am doing what I am sup­posed to be doing?

Female: Break right ampoule, agi­tate one minute.

What is the next step?

Female: Break mid­dle ampoule, wait for color. Break left ampoule, let color trans­fer to lower layer.

Okay, so we’re agi­tat­ing it. The point of it is that this is, like I said, prob­a­bly the most pop­u­lar form of test­ing that is going out on the street when­ever you have a solid drug dose. There are ones for mar­i­juana. There are spe­cial­ized ones for dif­fer­ent things that peo­ple run into – heroin. That’s there. Now we’re going to hit that mid­dle one, okay. Wait for the color to develop, that’s what it says. And then the last one, it’s there. As you can see it is kind of orange thingy, and I’ll pass it around so that every­one can see it. This is a neg­a­tive. It is kind of a blondish type of color that’s there. You can see because they want to make it very easy for street cops to know — pur­ple means bad stuff, means mar­i­juana, means that you got it there. I am going to pass this around.

So this is how you would do it out on the street. I am going to give you each one of these. Okay, you are going to be my testers and we’re going to see whether or not you go to jail. Are you ready? What we’re going to do is take a lit­tle bit more. I want you to open up your pack­age there. We’re not going to jam it up with a whole bunch of stuff but we’re going to put some of it in there if you don’t mind. Just a lit­tle bit more. Then what you are going to do is shove it with the load­ing stick, the high-tech load­ing stick down to the bot­tom, please. Are you ready to go? That’s prob­a­bly good. Now, you do the high tech load­ing. Your fate is in your hands, my friend.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to seal up the top. Just push it all the way down to the bot­tom. Break that left most ampoule. Go ahead, break it. Crush it with your fin­gers. Agi­tate it like it says. You don’t want to get the chem­i­cals on you. Do the same thing. Okay. You’ve done it for a minute, now let’s go ahead and crack the mid­dle one. And then what we’re going to do next is see whether or not it turns pur­ple and you go to jail. So hit that last one. Hold your breath. Okay, I’m pass­ing around one that I did imme­di­ately before this because it’s going to take about 30 sec­onds for it to develop. Pur­ple at the bot­tom. What you have to do is you have to take a look at it. This is a false pos­i­tive on a screen­ing device because of cof­fee. Yeah, you are going to jail. Look at this. I mean she’s done. For­get about it. That’s about as pur­ple as that guy’s shirt over there. Let’s pass it around and take a look at. Pur­ple. He’s done too. Thank you to our vol­un­teers. Let’s give them a round of applause.

I will pass around the rest of these kits. I don’t want to bring them back with me to Har­ris­burg. I have a bunch of them. And the high tech load­ing devices, let’s get those going around, too. The bot­tom line is, it’s just like John was say­ing ear­lier, that you have peo­ple who are being arrested or put in jail for even longer peri­ods of time because we as a defense bar have refused or have been scared to learn the sci­ence of it all. We need to learn the sci­ence of it in order to be effec­tive for our clients. At least in my opin­ion it’s not shame on the traf­fic cop, he’s there to do his job. It’s shame on us for not learn­ing it.

We want to start talk­ing about objec­tive ver­sus sub­jec­tive. It’s pretty sim­ple. Every­one knows what objec­tive means. It’s empir­i­cal. It is what it is. Then you have sub­jec­tive, which is inter­preted by an indi­vid­ual, poten­tially based upon bias, con­fir­ma­tion bias, and is sub­ject to inter­pre­ta­tion. It’s some­thing that is fun­gi­ble. It is some­thing that is vari­able. One per­son takes a look at a cloud and says “That one looks like a bunny rab­bit.” Another per­son takes a look at the same cloud and says “That looks like a tur­tle.” The third one says “a rocket ship,” a fourth per­son says noth­ing at all.

That’s the dif­fer­ence that’s there. In sci­ence and what we need to demand in the court­room is to get away from this hocus pocus, this make believe, this sub­jec­tive sci­ence that is going on out there, and we need to move more towards the objec­tive part of it. That’s only going to come by us forc­ing it as a defense bar.

The above is Part Two from a lec­ture given by Attor­ney Justin J. McShane before the North Car­olina Advo­cates for Jus­tice “Advanced DWI Sem­i­nar”.  This sem­i­nar hap­pened on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2010.  It was orga­nized and hosted by John K. Fan­ney, Esquire of  Fan­ney & Jack­son, P.C. The fol­low­ing is a tran­script of this video:

I get to talk about drug cases and drugs, and stuff like that. I get to go across the entire United States and have a lot of fun doing it. This is going to be a fun sem­i­nar. I hope it is going to be inter­ac­tive when we can get in the mood — I get to talk about when peo­ple get high.

[Music — Afroman]

What we are really talk­ing about is ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry; how they arrived at get­ting the magic num­ber. The cool kids are doing the ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry. What I mean by that is if you under­stand even the basics of it, it’s going to absolutely fas­ci­nate you to such a degree that you are going to do noth­ing but read about it and just become cap­ti­vated by it. If you can learn how to chal­lenge that magic num­ber, as I am going to start to show you, you can take off from here. Once you know how to do it, there is no stop to it. You are going to become that weapon of mass acquittal.

What we are really talk­ing about in ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry is what is called chro­matog­ra­phy. Chro­matog­ra­phy is sep­a­ra­tion sci­ence. It’s how you take some­thing that is com­plex and divide it into its inde­pen­dent parts. That’s chro­matog­ra­phy. It is an old sci­ence by SVELT. At the base, what you are doing is tak­ing com­pli­cated mix­tures, such as blood, which has a whole bunch of stuff in it, and you are look­ing to sep­a­rate it out into its  parts so you can fig­ure out how much ethanol is in it, or how much ben­zoli­do­cane is in it, or THC, Delta 9 THC. Chro­matog­ra­phy is sep­a­ra­tion sci­ence; it comes from the Greek words “chroma,” mean­ing color and “graphein,” which is to write. It is basi­cally lab­o­ra­tory science.

I am going to offer these to be the basic issues always ignored and things that we are going to talk about this morn­ing. The dif­fer­ence between a screen­ing and a con­fir­ma­tion test, foren­sic ver­sus non-forensic test­ing, and I mean that not from your state scientist’s point of view because they think every­thing is foren­sic because they are doing it. I am talk­ing about, in terms of the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity, the hard-core sci­en­tific com­mu­nity — there is a big dis­tinc­tion between those two. When you have a solid drug dose that often accom­pa­nies a DUID case, some­one gets pulled over dri­ving under the influ­ence of drugs and they find green leafy veg­eta­bles or white pow­der, that is, of course, we can’t ignore as prac­ti­tion­ers.  But one of the biggest ques­tions that is there is how on Earth did they actu­ally know that the white, off-white, chunky sub­stance is crack? That is a big question.

If you sit down and start to really think about it, as we are going to do with our time together, you are going to start to see some holes that are poten­tially there in the way they do their test­ing. Can they prove that the drug was actu­ally what it was or what they say it is in the solid dose form?  And of course Melendez-Diaz. Melendez-Diaz is, of course, the case from the United States Supreme Court, later there was Briscoe vs. Vir­ginia, which said the lab ana­lyst actu­ally has to come in and tes­tify. No longer can they do it by way of affi­davit and a piece of paper says you’re guilty.

What we want to do is take a look from the out­side in because we are out­siders. Has any­one here ever been to their state lab? Has any­one asked to go and inspect their state lab, to take a look at it? It is some­thing that maybe you folks should take a look at, because you would be amazed when you go in there and take a look at it.  First, it is great cross-examination ques­tion there where you can develop who they allow in the lab. You can ask them, “Can I come to your lab?” and they say, “No.” Then you find out that they let the Cub Scouts in and the Boy Scouts and any­one else but not defense attor­neys. There is poten­tial to show some bias that they are play­ing, not for the team of sci­ence, but rather for the team of con­vic­tion. That’s an impor­tant thing.

Lab­o­ra­tory analy­sis really breaks into not that many ele­gant things. Specif­i­cally what we are going to be talk­ing about here is the types of tests. There is screen­ing ver­sus con­fir­ma­tory. There is qual­i­ta­tive ver­sus quan­ti­ta­tive — quan­ti­ta­tive is how you arrive at that magic num­ber, the .162, qual­i­ta­tive is how you sep­a­rate out or can tell if it is cocaine ver­sus mar­i­juana ver­sus ETOH. That is called the qual­i­ta­tive mea­sure. Finally, there is objec­tive test­ing ver­sus sub­jec­tive testing.

The first thing I want to do is talk to you about col­ori­met­ric tests, or chem­i­cal color tests. Most vari­eties that are here, and they are truly screen­ing tests, are the Mar­quis Color, Cobalt thio­cyanate and Duquenois-Levine Test. Those are the three most preva­lent types of tests that are out there. What they are is very sim­ple. What it is, they take an unknown agent, what­ever it is, this green leafy veg­etable, they apply the agent and it changes color. That is all a col­ori­met­ric test is. It is a screen­ing test. What that means is that it has a high rate of false pos­i­tive, that means that is has the poten­tial of report­ing some­thing to be mar­i­juana that is not in fact mar­i­juana.  But it is designed, and it is sup­posed to have a low false neg­a­tive rate, which means that if it is not then it’s not. The bot­tom line is, even the best ones out there are not fool proof. It is a great illus­tra­tion of the dif­fer­ence between a screen­ing test and a con­fir­ma­tory test.

The above is Part One from a lec­ture given by Attor­ney Justin J. McShane before the North Car­olina Advo­cates for Jus­tice “Advanced DWI Sem­i­nar”.  This sem­i­nar hap­pened on Feb­ru­ary 26, 2010.  It was orga­nized and hosted by John K. Fan­ney, Esquire of  Fan­ney & Jack­son, P.C. The fol­low­ing is a tran­script of this video:

My name is Justin McShane. I am from Har­ris­burg, Penn­syl­va­nia. That’s our state cap­i­tal, not Philadel­phia or Pitts­burgh. It’s right in the mid­dle of the state. As John ref­er­enced, National Col­lege of DUI, I am a mem­ber of. If you have ques­tions at all about the blood test­ing related to cases, that’s what I spe­cial­ize in. That’s kind of what I am known for. Just shoot me an email and you can con­tact me through my twit face, you know, what­ever social media that’s out there, or through the web­site that is there.
The topic of this talk is “If You Want Blood You’ve Got It: Under­stand­ing, dis­cov­er­ing, pre­vent­ing errors in blood test­ing.” That is a nice title but the real title of my talk is going to be about how you need to start using experts and how an ana­lyt­i­cal chemist can be your best friend.

I would like to set the stage if we could just by very sim­ply lis­ten­ing to the Bare Naked Ladies.

[Music — The Big Bang The­ory Theme Song]

Bang! Okay, that’s what this sem­i­nar is going to do for you. We have such a star-struck, great lineup of speak­ers who are here through­out the day that you have heard about. This moment in time, hope­fully you will look back and say, “My good­ness, this was the big bang in my DWI career.” That’s what we hope to do.  And I am here to talk to you about ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry and specif­i­cally about that magic num­ber that they pump out whether it is from a blood test, or if it comes from a breath test. What we are basi­cally going to do is take a look at blood test­ing in great detail.

Now, blood test­ing, I under­stand, is about 1% of your state cases, from talk­ing to John and a lot of other peo­ple. The rea­son you are you going to start see­ing a lot more blood cases today is num­ber one, seri­ous acci­dents; num­ber two, you guys are doing a great job chal­leng­ing breath test cases. They know, the eas­i­est thing in the world to do is scare you with words like “gas chro­matog­ra­phy” and stuff like that.

Is there any­one in this room who has an ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry back­ground? See, this is amaz­ing. I go all across the United States and give this type of sem­i­nar — there is maybe one per­son who has ever raised their hand. Just to give you a background.

[inter­rup­tion – mur­mur about the peo­ple with ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry background]

Two, great.

The whole point of it is that we, as lawyers, did every­thing we could to avoid sci­ence as much as pos­si­ble. But, if you under­stand sci­ence, sci­ence is great. The truth and the best way to win these cases is through sci­ence. The day and age of smoke and mir­rors is over and done with. The sci­ence is actu­ally on our side. One of the things you will note when you start to try to present more sci­ence in the court­room, in a legit­i­mate man­ner, the more they will resist your efforts to do so. They will try to exclude your experts, they will try to tell you that you don’t need dis­cov­ery, and that’s exactly, pretty much, what you are going to run into.  But what you have to do is remem­ber this quote from Robert Frost. I believe in this quote, it hangs in my office, that twelve or six mem­bers of the jury, do you have twelve or six? Twelve. They are actu­ally there to judge who has the bet­ter lawyer. That comes through sci­ence, and the hon­est pre­sen­ta­tion of sci­ence. Sci­ence is the truth, sci­ence is the defense. Does any­one ever watch the show The Big Bang The­ory at all? It’s a great show. They have a motto that says, “Smart is the new sexy.” Well, smart is the new not guilty in DUI defense. Play­ing hide the ball, smoke and mir­rors and only try­ing cases that are refusals or ones that are “Who’s the dri­ver?”, that only gets you so far.

I am going to show you in this pre­sen­ta­tion how you can chal­lenge the sci­ence that is being pre­sented, force it to be shown for what it is, both its lim­i­ta­tions and its good parts, and to start tak­ing this back and mak­ing it so it is a not guilty.

With the objec­tives that we have here and if you present it, and I do this all the time, I do it in dif­fer­ent states and have the plea­sure of going around the United States.  If you start to show a jury the sci­ence you can use that “CSI affect” that we all know about to your ben­e­fit, where at the end of the day, you present it to them in an hon­est way and you show the lim­i­ta­tions of the test­ing — juries get that. You’re going to empower them not to ignore things, which are our tra­di­tional method, but to vote sci­ence at the end of the day. It is very impor­tant to take a look at that.

My objec­tives today…and just so you know, there are hand-outs that I think every­one has one here. There are only a cou­ple of new slides that I have added since I was out in Seat­tle. Basi­cally, this is being taped by both you good folks and I am also tap­ing it. It will be on YouTube at some point in time along with the Pow­er­Point slides being inte­grated. The rea­son I tell you that is because I want you folks to be exposed to this. I want you to sit back and lis­ten. Don’t worry about tak­ing down notes, okay?  Every­thing is in there. If you have ques­tions, I am happy to answer it all. It’s going to be like a for­eign lan­guage to us because we are all lib­eral arts majors. That’s what I was too, a lib­eral arts major. The whole point of it is not to become a mas­ter or an expert, in and of your­self, but to know what to look for so you can call up the expert or you can ask the ques­tion of John and some other folks that you have in this great state here, as far as what to do.

Our objec­tives here are to help you iden­tify cur­rent issues in defend­ing the cit­i­zen among us accused of a DUI offense; to intro­duce you to the sci­ence of ana­lyt­i­cal chem­istry; expose you to an idea of how to totally frus­trate a DA because you have learned the sci­ence and he has absolutely no idea about the sci­ence; to learn how to force bet­ter deals because what you are look­ing to do is cre­ate that knowl­edge gap. A DA is not sup­posed to lose a DUI case. How many peo­ple used to work in a DA’s office? If you lost a DUI case, didn’t you get made fun of? You aren’t sup­posed to lose those cases. It’s like los­ing a hand-to-hand deliv­ery case. It just doesn’t hap­pen. What you do is get them embar­rassed of the fact that they don’t know what you know and what you have been exposed to, and it is going to force a deal at the end of the day.  It will teach you how to bet­ter cross-examine experts so you know exactly what you are talk­ing about.  And then start using expert witnesses.

By a show of hands, how many peo­ple have ever used an ana­lyt­i­cal chemist or a phar­ma­col­o­gist in their DWI tri­als? We have 4 out of 98.  If you have an ana­lyt­i­cal chemist and a phar­ma­col­o­gist and some­one who is well-versed in the SFSTs, you are going to be an absolutely deadly per­son. Basi­cally, what we are going to be doing here together is learn­ing how to become that most awe­some weapon of mass acquit­tal. So become that weapon of mass acquit­tal. Let this be the spark of where you want to go with your career because not guilty’s is what we are sup­posed to do, and I am going to show you how we can do it.