Assembled by one person after a night in Central Lockup, working from Louisiana statutes, two fee agreements, and the paperwork the arrest actually generated.
The packet a defense attorney hands you after arraignment is rarely organized for a layperson, and it is rarely short. Police narrative, dispatch log, field notes, a breath test ticket with a column of numbers, maybe a crime lab report that arrives two months later. Most people skim it once and set it aside. That is a mistake, because the client is the only person in the room who was actually there, and the discrepancies that matter most are often the ones only you would notice. Here is where a careful reader looks first, in the order the evidence was created.
1. The reason the car was stopped
The test result sits at the end of a chain, and the first link is the stop itself, which is why the stop is contested before anybody argues about machines. An officer needs an articulable reason: a lane deviation, a burned-out plate light, speed, a rolling stop at a marked line. Read the narrative and ask whether the stated reason is specific enough to check. Compare it against what the dashboard or body camera video shows, and against the time stamps on the dispatch log. Vague phrasing that could describe any car on any road is worth flagging to your attorney early.
2. The twenty minutes before the breath test
Nearly every state's breath testing regulations require an observation period, usually fifteen or twenty minutes, during which the subject must not burp, vomit, smoke, or put anything in the mouth. The reason is mouth alcohol, which sits in the tissue and can produce a reading that has nothing to do with what is in the blood. So the question is not whether the officer wrote that the period was observed. The question is whether the timeline supports it. Compare the arrest time, the transport time, the booking entry, and the time printed on the breath ticket, then compare all of that against the video.
3. The calibration and maintenance record
A breath instrument is a measuring device, and measuring devices drift. States handle this with a schedule of accuracy checks, run against a reference solution or a dry gas standard of known concentration, logged each time. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is the federal body responsible for measurement standards of this kind, and the traceability of the reference material is part of what makes the number defensible. Ask for the maintenance log covering the months on either side of your test, not just the day of. Failed checks, repairs, replaced simulators, and gaps in the record are all things a defense expert will want.
4. The gap between driving and testing
Alcohol takes time to move from the stomach into the blood, so a person's blood alcohol concentration can still be climbing an hour after the last drink. The legal question is what the level was while driving, not what it was in a station house at two in the morning. That is the rising blood alcohol argument, and it lives or dies on timing. Write down when you last ate, when you last drank, and how much time passed between the stop and the test. Ninety minutes between the wheel and the mouthpiece is a very different case than twenty.
5. What happened to the blood vial
Blood cases run on paperwork. Who drew it, with what kit, whether the tube contained the preservative and anticoagulant it was supposed to contain, how it was sealed, who signed for it, how long it sat at what temperature, and when the lab actually ran it. Each handoff should appear on the chain of custody form, which is the document tracking possession of the sample from the arm to the analyst. Read the lab report for the analyst's name, the instrument used, and any noted deviation from protocol. Missing signatures and unexplained storage gaps are worth raising.
What to do with what you find
Bring the file back to your attorney with page numbers and specific questions, not general suspicion. A note that says the ticket prints 1:47 while the booking log shows you arrived at 1:38 is useful in a way that a feeling about unfairness is not. Good defense counsel will already be pulling calibration records and video, but the client's memory closes gaps that no subpoena reaches. That collaboration is where the real work of these cases gets done, and it starts with reading the packet slowly, twice, with a pen.