Photo: abcnet.au
Here’s a novel defense for a DUI charge: one woman from Berwick, Pennsylvania who got caught driving while intoxicated just tried to argue that the breathalyzer returned a skewed result because she’d been nibbling on her coat before police pulled her over.
First things first: the woman didn’t bother to explain why exactly she was nibbling on her coat, but it’s something the officer who pulled her over also remarked in his report. Apparently, when he stopped the car 47-year-old Jana Moschgat was in and he asked her for identification, she was chewing on her coat. He asked her to stop.
This police report probably gave Moschgat’s attorney ideas, because he just tried to get her out of the DUI charge on claims that whatever chemicals were in that coat seeped in her body and made the breath test give the wrong result, the New York Post reports.
Travis Petty, the attorney in question, reportedly asked the arresting officer “if he knew the chemical composition of the coat, noting that certain substances can alter the results of the test.” This happened during the first hearing on the DUI charge. The officer responded in the negative, but he did say that the woman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.151 percent, which is almost twice the legal limit for Pennsylvania.
The same cop also told the court that he could smell alcohol on the woman’s breath and that she also failed a sobriety field test. If the chemicals in her coat tricked the breathalyzer into giving false results as the attorney claims, maybe they also made her breath smell like alcohol and impaired her sufficiently to fail the sobriety test.
All jokes aside, the judge ruled that there was enough evidence for the case to go to trial. Petty gets some credit for coming up with the most childish, downright hilarious excuse for drunken driven (or attempt at an excuse, more like it), while Moschgat deserves whatever is coming to her for driving drunk.
This police report probably gave Moschgat’s attorney ideas, because he just tried to get her out of the DUI charge on claims that whatever chemicals were in that coat seeped in her body and made the breath test give the wrong result, the New York Post reports.
Travis Petty, the attorney in question, reportedly asked the arresting officer “if he knew the chemical composition of the coat, noting that certain substances can alter the results of the test.” This happened during the first hearing on the DUI charge. The officer responded in the negative, but he did say that the woman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.151 percent, which is almost twice the legal limit for Pennsylvania.
The same cop also told the court that he could smell alcohol on the woman’s breath and that she also failed a sobriety field test. If the chemicals in her coat tricked the breathalyzer into giving false results as the attorney claims, maybe they also made her breath smell like alcohol and impaired her sufficiently to fail the sobriety test.
All jokes aside, the judge ruled that there was enough evidence for the case to go to trial. Petty gets some credit for coming up with the most childish, downright hilarious excuse for drunken driven (or attempt at an excuse, more like it), while Moschgat deserves whatever is coming to her for driving drunk.
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