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Portland police arrest woman for DUI after accident on MAX tracks

Service to the MAX Yellow Line tracks had to be shut down for a few hours recently. According to police, a 38-year-old woman had been driving a Datsun pickup truck near the intersection of Interstate Avenue and North Russet Street in Portland when she crashed into a pole. While the crash itself was not extraordinary, the police claim that at the time of the accident, the woman was not on the roadways, but was on the MAX Yellow Line train tracks.

Following the accident, the woman was arrested and taken to Multnomah County Jail since she was not seriously injured in the accident. Subsequently, the woman was charged with both reckless driving and drunk driving.

While most people may say that they could never mistake a train track for a roadway, the fact is, mistakes happen. People can be in unfamiliar areas and go off the road by mistake. In this case, the fact that the woman went off the roadway, by itself may not be enough to prove that the woman had been under the influence of alcohol at the time of the accident.

In most cases, prosecutors are going to need concrete evidence that a person's blood alcohol content level was above the state's legal limit of .08 percent at the time of the accident in order to convict that person of DUI. In order to this police must have tested the woman's BAC level shortly around the time of her arrest. This could have been a breath test or a blood test. In either case, police must have followed specific collection rules for the tests to have been accurate.

Those facing DUI charges should question the police's collection methods as part of a comprehensive criminal defense strategy. If a person's BAC level was not measured accurately, the charges may be dropped.

Source: The Oregonian, "Woman arrested after alleged drunk driving crash on North Portland MAX tracks," Everton Bailey Jr., Aug. 16, 2013

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