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Challenging a urine test in Minnesota is actually very fruitful because urine testing has actually been abandoned by most of the states as a way of quantifying a person’s alcohol concentration. There’s a good reason for that, and I suppose the best is to illustrate that if you drink yourself up to a 0.12 and then fell asleep and slept for eight hours and got up in the morning and the first thing you did when you woke up in the morning was blew into a breath test machine, you’d blow all zeros. And if they then stuck a needle in your arm and took your blood, you’d bleed all zeros.
But that first urine in the morning is still going to be a 0.12 because the bladder only has one way of eliminating alcohol, and that’s through urination. Because of that, almost every state, and one could argue all, but one state, has abandoned the practice of testing the first void of the bladder. So unless the officer knows when the last time was that you emptied the bladder, urine testing is simply not permitted in most states. The one state that is obviously left that allows testing of the first void of the bladder is the state of Minnesota, which can be a very – again, when we’re talking to jurors about whether this is proof beyond a reasonable doubt, everybody wants to know that it would be fair to them. Not just that it’s fair to my client sitting next to me in a criminal courtroom, that if they were applying that testing method to me, I would be confident that I was treated fairly. And anybody who’s been subjected to a urine test is never gonna – for alcohol quantification is never gonna think they were treated fairly.
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Minnesota criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Sheridan explains how to challenge a urine test.