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Comment by Noah_SannTek | Hacker News Reader

We absolutely consider ethical implications for bringing this product to market. We currently live in a world where it's a "free-for-all", and officers establish reasonable suspicion, which leads to an arrest, without any objective evidence. We hypothesize that this is part of the reason why there's a higher number of PoC arrested. This doesn't happen with alcohol, because there is an objective device.

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I'm sorry, but this is just not true. People are innocent until proven guilty. If there is no evidence, then they aren't convicted (EDIT: for the record, testimony is evidence). Adding an avenue to collect more evidence is going to cause more people to be convicted. Sure, you will probably get some people exonerated, but there is no question that you will get a larger number of people convicted. I am not going to weigh in on the ethics of that, but you should at least be honest about the repercussions of your work.

Apologies, one thing I forgot to mention is that once reasonable suspicion is established, and an arrest happens, if you aren't blowing over 0.08 for alcohol, police will request a blood test. It's possible that for frequent users, THC will show up in these blood tests even though they haven't recently smoked. If an officer screens you on our device (which only has a 3 hour window of detection) and there is no THC, they have no further reason to request a blood test. Thoughts?

(American viewpoint about this device being potentially used in America. Courts and policing is different in Canada, and so my feelings here aren't neccesarily how it would work out there)

In many (most?) states you can refuse the blood test, until they get a warrant, even though you cannot refuse the Breathalyzer. I believe this will be used as a tool to make arrests and generate probable cause which will then immediately be used to obtain a warrant and blood test, which will hold up in court much better than the Breathalyzer alone or nothing at all.

I'm sorry, but even if this product works perfect technically I see it harming more people than it helps. Throw in chance of false positives and likely hood it is used by biased individuals in a biased way (only some individuals are told to blow multiple times, etc) and I really believe this product deployed in America would have a negative impact on most people.

>It's possible that for frequent users, THC will show up in these blood tests even though they haven't recently smoked

That leaves reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt favors the accused. If your device removes reasonable doubt, it does not benefit the accused.

The device adds reasonable doubt over the status quo in the case where a blood test shows positive for THC and the device shows negative.

Convictions are not the only way for a police encounter to be a problem in the United States. 70% of the local jail population has never been convicted of a crime: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2017_jail_detail.html

Are we sure this is true? I would be curious to see the current conviction ratio (convicted / arrested) for driving while impaired by alcohol vs marijuana. If there is a lower conviction rate for marijuana currently, you might be right... but it could be that courts simply choose to believe the cops word when there is no hard evidence.

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