Fallout looms as faulty DUI test kits used across California may have had false results for the past 10 years

California may be staring at one of those quiet forensic failures that does not look dramatic at first, but gets worse the longer you think about it.

According to a FOX 11 Los Angeles report, state officials have admitted that urine test kits used for years in DUI cases may have produced false-positive or artificially elevated alcohol readings, creating a problem that now stretches backward across nearly a decade of arrests, prosecutions, pleas, and convictions. 

Attorney and legal commentator Steve Lehto, discussing the same issue on Lehto’s Law, called it exactly the kind of systemic failure that can lead to dozens, maybe hundreds, of cases being thrown out – and, more unsettlingly, to people realizing years later that a conviction may have been built on bad science.

That is the part that lands the hardest.

A lot of criminal justice scandals involve misconduct, hidden evidence, or bad witnesses. This one appears to involve something that sounds dry and technical: the wrong amount of a chemical preservative in urine kits. But that small laboratory problem may have changed case outcomes in ways that were anything but technical for the people affected.

What the State Says Went Wrong

FOX 11 reported that the issue centers on urinalysis kits supplied by Simi Valley-based Andwin Scientific.

Those kits were labeled as containing 750 milligrams of sodium fluoride, a preservative meant to stop fermentation in the sample after it is collected. But according to the state’s findings, the kits actually contained only 100 milligrams. That difference matters because, without enough preservative, samples containing sugar or yeast can ferment after collection and create alcohol inside the vial.

As FOX 11 explained, that can lead to an “artificially elevated alcohol level.”

The report quoted Katina Repp, director of the state’s Santa Rosa lab, saying exactly that. And once you understand that one sentence, the entire problem becomes much easier to grasp. The test may not have been measuring only what was in the person’s body at the time of collection. In at least some cases, it may also have been measuring alcohol generated later, inside the sample itself.

That is not a small flaw. That goes directly to reliability.

Steve Lehto, going through the FOX 11 reporting on his show, broke it down in similarly plain language. He said sodium fluoride was the critical preservative here, and without enough of it, the sample could ferment, which would cause the alcohol percentage to spike. In other words, the science was not wrong in theory, but the test environment had been compromised before the science even did its job.

A Ten-Year Window With Unknown Damage

The timeline makes the story worse.

FOX 11 said Andwin Scientific began supplying the flawed kits to the state’s Santa Rosa forensic lab in 2016. The California Department of Justice did not learn until August 2025 that the kits were producing false positives. Replacement kits with the correct sodium fluoride levels were distributed in September 2025, but broader formal notifications to public defenders and local agencies did not begin arriving until early 2026.

That lag is one of the most troubling details in the whole story.

FOX 11 noted that it remains unclear why there was such a delay between the state discovering the flaw in August and the more widespread notification of defense attorneys months later. That question is not just bureaucratic. If officials knew a test system may have been yielding unreliable results, every month of delay mattered, especially for anyone still dealing with charges, probation, suspended licenses, or post-conviction consequences.

Lehto zeroed in on that too.

He pointed out that once attorneys receive a notice like this, they may be asked to go back through years of files and identify old cases involving urinalysis and alcohol readings. He also noted the obvious practical problem: many lawyers keep physical files for seven years, though digital retention may help with older records. Still, the idea that defense lawyers now may have to reconstruct ten years of potentially tainted cases is daunting.

And for defendants, it is far worse than daunting. It is life-altering.

How Many Cases Could Be Affected?

Right now, nobody seems able to say for sure.

FOX 11 reported that a state audit flagged 97 tests, about 0.07% of reviewed cases, where alcohol levels were at or near the 0.04% legal threshold for commercial drivers. That is the number officials have identified specifically, but the report also made clear that the full scope remains unknown, especially in smaller jurisdictions that relied on the affected kits and do not have the independent lab systems used in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco.

That “unknown” category may be the most important number of all.

Because the issue is not limited to the 97 flagged tests. Those are simply the cases the audit caught under one set of criteria. FOX 11 said the total number of convictions that could ultimately be reviewed or overturned is still an “untold number,” and that phrase feels appropriate because the real damage may not be visible until local defender offices start pulling files one by one.

Lehto made the same point in his own way.

He said 97 flagged tests is “quite a few,” but then immediately moved to the larger issue, which is that nobody yet knows how many other cases out there may have the same problem. And because this is a decade-long window, the answers are unlikely to come quickly.

That means California is now in the unpleasant middle stage of a forensic crisis: enough is known to create real alarm, but not enough is known to contain it.

Why This Could Be Devastating for the Wrongfully Convicted

Steve Lehto’s strongest comments were not about chemistry. They were about consequences.

He said the frightening part is imagining someone who was convicted nine or ten years ago based on what appeared to be solid scientific evidence, only to learn much later that the result may have been false or inflated because the kit itself was flawed. DUI cases do not just come with a fine and a bad afternoon. They can mean suspended or revoked licenses, insurance spikes, points on a record, employment loss, and a lasting stain that follows someone for years.

That is where the moral weight of this story really sits.

Lehto said he has handled many drunk driving cases in his career, and he talked about how strongly juries and courts tend to defer to scientific-sounding evidence. If a prosecutor says a machine or lab result is accurate to a tiny decimal point, many people stop questioning. That is understandable. Science in court carries authority. But when the sample itself was compromised by a faulty kit, that authority becomes dangerous.

And unlike some courtroom mistakes, this kind of harm does not neatly unwind.

A person may have taken a plea to avoid a worse outcome. They may have lost a job years ago because of a DUI conviction. They may have lived with increased insurance costs, restricted driving rights, or professional damage that no future court ruling can fully erase. A do-over on paper is not the same thing as getting your old life back.

That is why this kind of scandal feels so corrosive. It does not just challenge past verdicts. It challenges trust.

Not Every DUI Case Is Suddenly in Jeopardy

At the same time, both the FOX 11 report and Lehto’s comments imply a limit that matters.

This does not mean every DUI conviction in California from the last decade is suddenly invalid. The problem appears specific to certain urinalysis kits used by certain agencies. Large counties like Los Angeles and San Francisco were reportedly unaffected because they use their own labs. And, as Lehto emphasized, many DUI cases hinge on other kinds of evidence altogether, such as field sobriety tests, roadside breath tests, station breathalyzer results, blood draws, poor driving observations, and officer testimony.

That distinction is important for clarity.

If someone blew far over the legal limit on multiple reliable devices and there was no urine test involved, this scandal will not help them. But if a case turned significantly on one of these urine kits, especially near a legal threshold, then the reliability issue becomes very serious very quickly.

That is where the case-by-case review now becomes so important.

FOX 11 reported that public defender offices across the 60 affected agencies are expected to audit years of files to identify clients who may have been wrongfully convicted. That is a huge burden, but there is really no honest alternative once the state acknowledges that a core piece of evidence may have been tainted.

The State Has Fixed the Kits, But Not the Fallout

According to FOX 11, the state has already moved to ensure that current testing kits now meet the proper chemical standards, and replacement kits were distributed months ago.

That addresses the forward-looking problem. It does nothing to solve the backward-looking one.

And that backward-looking problem may linger for years. Courts will need to decide what kinds of proof justify reopening a case. Defense attorneys and public defenders will need time to identify which files even involved these kits. Prosecutors will have to decide whether to fight those challenges or concede them. Judges will be asked to reconsider convictions that once looked airtight.

All because a preservative was missing in the amount promised on the label.

That almost sounds too mundane to be true, which may be why stories like this hit so hard. Criminal justice systems like to present themselves as exact, scientific, and orderly. But sometimes the whole thing can be bent by one manufacturing flaw that no one caught for years.

FOX 11 called it a forensic crisis, and that seems fair.

Lehto, in his own way, called it a scary concept, and that is fair too. Because for the people whose names sit in those files, this is no longer about sodium fluoride, lab standards, or agency notifications. It is about whether the state told a jury, a judge, or a defendant that the numbers were solid when the foundation underneath them was not.

And if that happened, California is not just reviewing old DUI cases. It is reopening an old and very uncomfortable question about how much faith the public should place in forensic evidence when the system using it fails this quietly for this long.