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Bartel v. State8/27/1985
of coordination that, had the District Court relied principally on these and not so heavily on the blood test results, I would then support its judgment. But because the blood test results weighed so heavily in its opinion in determining the intoxication of Bartel, I am forced to dissent.
I have never worshipped at the shrine of blood test results because they are for the most part a false idol, with feet of clay and the heart of a gas chromatograph.
It is evident that the majority and the District Court have not thoroughly thought out the implications of blood test results, because each blithely accepts that Bartel had "a blood alcohol level of .171 percent" or that at the time of the accident, Bartel's blood alcohol was "between .103 and .213 percent." Percent of what? Blood alcohol levels cannot be defined in terms of percentage unless they are expressed in terms of percentage of weight or percentage of volume. Neither volume nor weight is met under the evidence in this case.
The statute defining "alcohol concentration," for the purpose of this case, requires grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. Section 61-8-407, MCA. Grams are a measure of weight. Milliliters are a measure of volume. One cannot be expressed in terms of the other by percentage unless the substances being compared weigh exactly the same.
Alcohol is lighter than water, because it floats on water. In fact, absolute alcohol has a specific gravity of 0.789, compared to water which has a specific gravity of 1. Blood is thicker than water, both socially and physically. I do not know the specific gravity of human blood but I suspect that it is greater than the specific gravity of water because my personal observation is that blood sinks in water. A cubic centimeter of alcohol, therefore, would weigh much less than a cubic centimeter of human blood. If we had a 100 milliliter mixture of water and alcohol of which the alcohol consisted of 1 percent by volume, the alcohol in the mixture would weigh 0.789 grams. If the alcohol in the same mixture constituted 1 percent by weight, the mixture would contain nearly 1.267 cubic centimeters of alcohol. Chemically that is a vast difference.
It is for that reason that the statute defining alcohol concentration now avoids references to percent, and relates instead to weight of alcohol per volume of blood. There is nothing, however, in the record before us to tell us what the so-called experts were talking about when they were referring to "percent" in determining blood alcohol levels.
Lost in the mumbo-jumbo of the pseudo-science of blood alcohol tests is the fact that the tests involve infinitesimally small amounts. This is because statutory blood alcohol terms are couched in terms of metric measures, perhaps purposely so. Most Americans do not comprehend the relationship between metric measures and their U.S. equivalents. It may have helped if section 61-8-407, MCA, had defined "alcohol concentration" as the number of 0.035 ounces of alcohol per 6.1 cubic inches of blood. (A gram is 0.035 ounce.) We might be able to grasp then that if Bartel's blood alcohol level was 0.171 (assuming that 0.171 refers to grams) that his actual alcohol level per ounce was 0.005985 (0.171 x 0.035). Put another way, if each ounce of his blood was broken into a thousand parts, at a blood alcohol level of 0.171, six parts of that blood would constitute alcohol.
The minuteness of those figures is lost in the metric system in the pseudo-science of blood alcohol levels. Minute amounts of alcohol in the blood can cause intoxication. Minute amounts of other alcohol-related substances, if present, can seriously distort blood te
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