The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed with a special master that a state police technician’s errors in calibrating Alcotest devices negate the validity of more than 20,000 breath tests performed on defendants.
In a unanimous ruling on Tuesday, the court said that the technician’s failure to properly calibrate the breath-test machines means that 20,667 cases must be either retried, in the case of convictions, or perhaps abandoned, if they are still pending.