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DETROIT (AP) — No one was wrongly charged with drunken driving as a result of errors in how state police measured alcohol in 4,001 blood samples from across Michigan, a spokesman said Tuesday.
Lt. Mike Shaw acknowledged the problem, a day after the Wayne County prosecutor's office announced it was taking another look at 89 cases. But he said there was "no misconduct" at the lab, just "human error" that was raised as soon as it was discovered earlier this year.
"We caught the mistake ourselves. We were transparent about it," Shaw told The Associated Press. "There was no secret."
He explained that police departments statewide routinely send blood samples to a state lab in cases of suspected drunken driving. Shaw said the problem with samples over a four-month period involved a high-tech processing file on one of the machines.
"It was a technology issue," he said. "One of the employees noticed the wrong algorithm at the top of the report. That's when they stopped what they were doing."
Half of the 4,001 cases didn't require any corrected measurements, according to a letter to prosecutors. Shaw said the new results also didn't have an impact in cases where the blood-alcohol level was initially found to be near 0.08, the threshold for a drunken driving charge.
"The errors were minute. ...No one was wrongly prosecuted," he said.
But in 18 cases, the new results put the blood-alcohol level at 0.17 or slightly higher. That is the threshold for "super drunk," which is a more serious drunken driving charge.
New summaries are being sent to county prosecutors, who are sharing the results with defense lawyers.
Defense attorney Neil Rockind said the lab's "credibility is shot."
"How can we trust the accuracy of other MSP test results following this debacle? ...This is going to make it very difficult for MSP technicians to testify with 100 percent assurance and authority moving forward," said Rockind, a former prosecutor.
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