ACS-CHAL Lawyer-Scientist: What It Means That Your DWI Lawyer Trained on the Same Machines the Crime Lab Uses
Attorney Bryan Orihel recently completed a program over several years, consisting of four courses and more than 100 hours of classroom and hands-on laboratory work. Bryan trained on the analytical instruments that produce blood-alcohol and drug results in criminal cases — headspace gas chromatography, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, and solid-dose drug identification. At the end of the fourth course, Bryan sat for and passed a comprehensive examination. The result is the ACS-CHAL Forensic Lawyer-Scientist designation from the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemistry and the Law.
Here is why it matters to somebody sitting in a courtroom in Bexar County with a blood test pointed at them.
A blood-alcohol result is a manufactured number
When the State says your blood alcohol concentration was let’s say a .135, that number did not appear on its own. It was manufactured. Someone drew your blood into a gray-top tube that was supposed to contain a preservative and an anticoagulant, and that tube had an expiration date. Someone transported it and stored it at some temperature for some length of time. Someone at a laboratory logged it into a batch alongside dozens of other people’s vials, prepared it, and loaded it onto an instrument. The instrument had been calibrated — with calibrators someone prepared, verified against controls a human being ran. Software integrated the resulting peaks and printed a number.
Every one of those steps is a place where the number can be wrong. And every one of those steps generates a record.
“A blood-alcohol number is just a number, it requires the correct science and applied procedures to be accurate and legitimate” says Attorney Orihel. ”Theses results come from a machine run by a human being, under a written procedure, on a sample that was collected, preserved, and stored by other human beings. Humans like all other human beings can makes mistakes, take short cuts, or not completely understand the science behind what they are doing.”
What this training includes:
The program was not a lecture series on how to cross-examine a chemist. It was chemistry, taught in a laboratory:
● Biology, chemistry, forensics, and toxicology fundamentals — how ethanol and drugs move through the body, and what a laboratory is actually measuring when it reports a concentration.
● Headspace gas chromatography — the method Texas laboratories use for blood alcohol. How a column separates compounds, what retention time means, how an internal standard works, and what a clean chromatogram looks like as against one with a fronting or tailing peak, a co-elution, or an unidentified peak where nothing should be.
● Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry — how a compound is identified rather than merely detected, how library matching works, and where identification claims get soft.
● Solid-dose drug analysis — how a submitted substance is identified, and the limits of what an analyst’s report can and cannot establish.
● Quality assurance and instrument performance — calibration, calibration verification, controls, carryover, uncertainty of measurement, and what a laboratory’s own written procedure requires of the analyst.
What this training lets us do for your case
What this training does is put Bryan in a position to evaluate the State’s science myself rather than take it on faith. The training gives Bryan the knowledge to:
● Ask for the right things. A one-page laboratory report is not discovery. The batch data, the worklist and sequence, the calibration and control results, the chromatograms for every vial in the run, the instrument maintenance logs, the analyst’s training file, and the laboratory’s standard operating procedures are. If you do not know these records exist, you do not request them.
● Read the data himself. Bryan can review the chromatograms and the batch records and form my own view, before spending your money on an expert, and I can tell an expert precisely what to look at.
● Cross-examine on the procedure. Laboratories operate under written procedures. Departures from those procedures are the concrete, showable kind of problem a jury can follow.
● Know when the State’s result is solid. This matters as much as the rest. If the scienceholds up, that changes what the right strategy is — and you are entitled to a lawyer who can tell the difference instead of guessing.
Most if not all people would be shocked at the amount of legitimate issues that arise when reviewing a client’s blood test documentation. Whether it be issues with improper blood vials, improper storage, a failure to follow consensus industry standards and procedures, or mistakes occurring in the actual sampling and testing of the blood.
Bryan sat at the same bench, ran the same instruments, and read a chromatogram the way an analyst reads one. When the State’s result is sound, he will know it. When something in the batch data, the calibration, the controls, or the chain of custody does not hold up, Bryan will know that too.
