You do not want to get pulled over for impaired driving, so you purchase your own breath test. It gives you a quick and easy way to check your own blood alcohol concentration (BAC) before you get behind the wheel. Say you’re having a drink or two with your friends at the bar. You simply want to see if you can safely drive home or if you should wait for a bit and let your BAC go down.
In some senses, purchasing your own breath test can be helpful. It may give you an indicator that you are too impaired to drive, which could help you avoid a ticket. But remember that this isn’t necessarily going to get you out of the charges if you get pulled over.
Inadmissible evidence
Often, personal breath tests are considered inadmissible evidence. You can’t use them in court. The reading cannot prove that you were sober.
For example, say that you take your breath test and it says your BAC is just 0.02%. But a police officer gives you a test after a traffic stop, and it says that you have a BAC of 0.08%. You may claim that the results you got on your own test show that the officer’s test is wrong, but there’s no way for the court to actually know if that’s true.
For one thing, perhaps you never calibrated your breath test. Maybe you didn’t administer it correctly. Maybe the device itself is faulty and simply doesn’t work. For all the court knows, you’re not even the person who took the breath test that generated those results.
In other words, it may help to have your own breath test device, but don’t count on it to get you out of an arrest. If you do get arrested, take the time to look into your legal options instead.