[paulmd]

Seems obvious what happened in context: the government got tired of people “weaseling out” of speeding tickets and breathalyzers (think of the kids!!!) and wrote a law saying the machine right by default unless you had a reason to think otherwise. And of course prosecutors never rest at constructing a novel theory to win cases, so soon enough it was being used in serious cases and not speeding tickets…

(not that it’s fundamentally just with speeding tickets either really! but it's also kind of understandable, you're the 27th person the judge has heard today trying to weasel out of a speeding ticket with the same set of "but the machine could have been wrong!" excuses. And frankly the brits seem to be a lot more "pragmatic" about individual right vs societal ones... the political class there seems to respect the people there exceptionally little even by political-class standards lol)