Historical turning point to certify drunk driving. The Court of Cassation has established that an alcohol test is not necessary to ascertain impaired driving by alcohol. The testimonies of the officers who testify, for example, to the smell of alcohol or the inability of the person driving, essentially elements “objective and symptomatici” which do not require the use of an alcohol test to establish that the threshold of 1.5 has been exceeded.
Historic turning point on drunk driving
In the ruling of Cassationthus rejecting the memory of a motorist from Brescia, we read that “since the instrumental exam it does not constitute legal evidencethe assessment of the alcohol concentration can be carried out on the basis of symptomatic elements for all the cases of crime envisaged by article 186 of the Highway Code and if the upper thresholds are exceeded the decision must be supported by adequate motivation”.
No more alcohol tests?
What was established by the Court then reads: “It follows therefore, in the absence of a valid alcohol test – we read in the sentence -, the judge of merit can draw his own conviction regarding the existence of the state of intoxication of adequate objective and symptomatic elements, which in the case in question the judges of merit have appropriately identified in aspects such as the comatose and altered state manifested by the accused in the sight of the workers, certainly attributable to a very high use of alcoholic beverages, certainly higher than the threshold of 1.50″.
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