Woman Charged with Drunk Driving & Child Endangerment
A Sarasota mother is facing multiple charges after police pulled over on the first of October. The woman was caught after she was involved in an accident. Sheriff’s deputies say that there were two young children in the car when the accident occurred. Twenty-seven-year-old Kimberly Toomy was filling out paperwork regarding the accident when police noticed that she smelled of alcohol and was having difficulty maintaining her balance. They conducted a field sobriety test and Toomy appeared to topple over. She was taken to the station and administered a breathalyzer test where police say she blew a .355 which sounds a bit exorbitant.
What Happens When Your BAC is Above .35?
Basically, you’ve reached the same level as surgical anesthesia. A leading researcher reports that a BAC of above .34 is very close to death. At around .35, vital functions in the body shut off. This includes reflexes such as sneezing, coughing, gagging, breathing, and the beating of your heart. In other words, it’s very unlikely that her BAC was that high. So then why did the breathalyzer record her BAC as being high enough to kill someone?
Was the Breathalyzer Calibrated Properly?
Breathalyzers need to be calibrated properly in order to effectively measure a driver’s blood alcohol content. Scientifically, there is only one method that scientists agree can measure BAC competently. That would be directly measuring the blood, which makes sense because the alcohol stays in the bloodstream and can be measured by burning off the alcohol and then measuring the blood again.
Breathalyzers, on the other hand, don’t measure the blood. There is an algorithm that converts the amount of alcohol on your breath into a BAC. But if the device isn’t calibrated properly, it will give impossible readings like the one above.
Additionally, breathalyzers may not be reliable in general. One Iowa man blew allegedly had a BAC of .467, but the breathalyzer didn’t go up that high. Instead, it simply returned “HI” as output.
Of course, the police can turn around an always claim that the individual mentioned above or the woman who was arrested with her children had such a high tolerance for alcohol that they were able to survive saturation that would be lethal to most responsible citizens.
Police mentioned that the woman had the alcohol in a McDonald’s cup. After she got into the accident, she may have downed all of the alcohol in the cup. This may have, in turn, resulted in a severely inflated breathalyzer test. Since blood tests can form the basis of how much trouble a driver gets into, the police will need to test her blood in order to ensure that the results are accurate.
Talk to an Orlando DUI Attorney Today
If you’ve been arrested for DUI in Orlando, you do have options. Breathalyzers sometimes lie and field sobriety tests can too. A skilled DUI attorney knows in what situations these methods give false positives and can advocate that’s what happened in your case. Call the Florida DUI defense attorneys at the FL DUI Group today for more details on defending yourself against DUI.
Resources:
huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/07/levi-carter-_n_4557700.html
mysuncoast.com/2019/10/01/sarasota-woman-accused-driving-drunk-getting-crash-with-two-young-children-her-car/
https://www.flduigroup.com/orlando-eye-doctor-charged-with-dui/
