Ashley Jourdan Coffey, Plaintiff and Appellant v. Jean Shiomoto, as Director

Summary

The court affirmed the judgment upholding the DMV's administrative suspension of Coffey's driver's license. It held that her expert's testimony was sufficient to rebut any statutory presumption concerning her BAC at the time of driving, but that the DMV could then consider the chemical-test results together with circumstantial evidence of intoxication in deciding whether her BAC met the legal threshold. Justice Liu, concurring, would limit the relevance of impairment evidence to rebutting the rising-BAC theory rather than generally proving a BAC of 0.08 percent or higher.