What are agency inspection records and why do they matter?

Every evidentiary breath instrument in Florida generates a monthly inspection report on a prescribed FDLE form, filled out by a permitted agency inspector.

Why these matter more than most evidence in a DUI case: they're contemporaneous, they were created by the State, and nobody wrote them with your case in mind. An officer's memory of the observation period is contestable. A missing inspection report for March is not.

What defense counsel looks for is straightforward — whether an inspection exists for every calendar month, whether the instrument was used during any gap, whether the inspector held a valid permit, whether the procedures on the form were actually followed, and whether the instrument left for repair and came back without the required re-inspection.

This isn't glamorous work. It's reading a stack of forms and counting. But it produces suppression far more reliably than cross-examining an officer about how impaired someone looked.