By Owen Reid
The Supreme Court has overturned a High Court ruling which quashed Andrejs Ratinskis's drink-driving conviction because Garda evidence did not account for every stage in the custody of his blood sample before it was posted for analysis.
Ratinskis was arrested shortly after 11pm on August 20, 2022 after failing to provide a breath specimen at a mandatory checkpoint. A doctor took a blood sample at 12.37am. The sample was divided into two bottles, labelled and placed in separately sealed containers. Ratinskis accepted one container and the other was retained for analysis.
Garda Houlihan placed the retained sample and statutory form in a marked box and posted it to the Medical Bureau of Road Safety the following day. The Bureau later certified a blood-alcohol concentration of 126mg per 100ml, against a statutory maximum of 50mg.
Ratinskis was convicted in the District Court, fined €350 and disqualified from driving for two years. His defence had argued that the prosecution failed to prove how the sealed sample was stored before posting.
The High Court subsequently quashed the conviction, finding that the prosecution was required to prove the chain of custody and that statutory presumptions did not fill the evidential gap.
Ms Justice Iseult O'Malley, delivering the Supreme Court judgment, rejected that analysis. She held that the physical blood specimen was not itself evidence produced in court. The evidence was the Bureau's analysis certificate, whose admissibility and evidential status are expressly provided for by statute.
The court said a gap in evidence about custody may affect the weight or reliability of evidence if a genuine issue is raised, but it is not automatically a condition of admissibility. A defence cannot displace the statutory certificate merely by suggesting that something might have gone wrong.
The court also stressed that numbered seals and matching statutory forms are designed to safeguard sample integrity and that tampering would be apparent.
The DPP's appeal was allowed. The Supreme Court added that the original challenge was better suited to a case stated on a point of law than to judicial review.