Woman Beats DUI Rap With Claim Her Body Brews Alcohol
Drunken-driving charges against an upstate New York woman have been dismissed based on an unusual defense: Her body is a brewery.
The woman was arrested while driving with a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit. She then discovered she has a rare condition called "auto-brewery syndrome," in which her digestive system converts ordinary food into alcohol, her lawyer Joseph Marusak said in interviews this week.
A town judge in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg dismissed the drunken-driving charges this month after Marusak presented a doctor's research showing the woman had the previously undiagnosed condition in which
high levels of yeast in her intestines fermented high-carbohydrate foods into alcohol.
The rare condition, also known as gut fermentation syndrome, was first documented in the 1970s in Japan, and both medical and legal experts in the U.S. say it is being raised more frequently in drunken-driving cases as it is becomes more known.
"At first glance, it seems like a get-out-of-jail-free card," said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. "But it's not that easy. Courts tend to be skeptical of such claims. You have to be able to document the syndrome through recognized testing."
The condition was first documented in the U.S. by Barbara Cordell of Panola College in Texas, who published a case study in 2013 of a 61-year-old man who had been experiencing episodes of debilitating drunkenness without drinking liquor.
Marusak contacted Cordell for help with his client who insisted she hadn't had more than three drinks in the six hours before she was pulled over for erratic driving Oct. 11, 2014. The woman was charged with driving while intoxicated when a Breathalyzer test showed her blood-alcohol content to be 0.33 percent.
Cordell referred Marusak to Dr. Anup Kanodia of Columbus, Ohio, who eventually diagnosed the woman with auto-brewery syndrome and prescribed a low-carbohydrate diet that brought the situation under control. She is currently free to drive without restrictions.
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