About a decade ago, a Simi Valley-based medical supply company began providing California Department of Justice urinalysis testing to law enforcement agencies across the state that did not have local forensic laboratories to test for alcohol.
Most of the time, testing kits supplied by Endwin Scientific were faulty, according to a letter sent by state officials to Sonoma County prosecutors, potentially leading to inflated results for DUI suspects in California’s wine country and elsewhere, which was first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
As a result, countless criminal cases across California were potentially up for review, with about 60 law enforcement agencies and seven district attorneys’ offices informed that cases in their jurisdictions could be affected, a spokeswoman for the state Justice Department said. Generally, urinalysis tests are rarely used to prosecute DUI.
After an audit by the state, officials told The Times this week, the state Justice Department determined that only a small number of California DUI and other cases involving alcohol analysis — 0.07% — involved faulty urine tests and needed to be reviewed.
Now it’s up to local jurisdictions like Sonoma County to dig deeper and see if anything was missed. Larger counties like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orange County, which have their own laboratories, were not affected.
“We have alerted the affected agencies so they can conduct their own review of the information in the case,” state Justice Department officials told The Times in an email.
Officials first learned the tests were faulty last summer, according to a letter sent to Sonoma County by state officials.
According to the state’s letter, for nearly 10 years then, testing kits supplied to the state by Endwin Scientific did not contain the required amount of the chemical compound sodium fluoride to prevent urine samples from fermenting. This meant that urine samples with high sugar content could begin to ferment and produce alcohol as a result which could distort the test result or give a false positive result.
For that to happen, many different variables have to align, Katina Repp, director of the state laboratory in Santa Rosa, told the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office in a Jan. 28 letter.
For low levels of the fermentation-inhibiting compound to make a difference, there would need to be a high concentration of sugar in the urine tested, which usually only happens in people with diabetes. In order for that sugar to ferment and form alcohol, the person providing the sample must also have a yeast infection, he wrote.
“It is possible, under these ideal conditions described above, that some fermentation may have occurred (in some tests),” Rep wrote. “However, this is still unlikely because there was at least some sodium fluoride that would help preserve the sample.”
After being informed of the issue, Endwin Scientific fixed the tests and the state began an audit of all criminal cases they believed might have been affected. The audit ultimately identified 97 tests that showed alcohol in a person’s system near or above 0.04% – the maximum allowed for commercial drivers before being charged with a DUI. The department did not explain why it chose this limit.
The chief deputy district attorney said that of the thousands of DUI cases Sonoma County has prosecuted since 2016, only six were ultimately flagged for in-depth review. Atty. Matthew Henning said.
In each case, the office concluded that there was enough other evidence of intoxication that nothing else needed to be done. In the other three criminal cases, he said, the people who provided urine samples were not defendants.
According to a letter from Sonoma County prosecutors to the public defender’s office obtained by The Times, attorneys in each case were notified, including the public defender’s office.
“While we have attempted to identify all of the Sonoma County cases that were potentially affected by what is described in the attached letter, please let us know if there are any other cases that you know of that should be evaluated, and we will investigate those cases immediately,” Asst. Dist. Atty. Brian Stabel wrote.
In an email to The Times on Wednesday, the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office said they are “looking into these issues.” The Sonoma County public defender’s office did not immediately provide comment.
