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

Summary

The court affirmed the denial of Coffey's challenge to the administrative suspension of her driver's license. It held that her expert's testimony was sufficient to rebut any statutory presumption that her BAC was at least 0.08 percent when she was driving, but that the DMV could then rely on the chemical-test results together with relevant circumstantial evidence of intoxication to determine whether she had driven at or above the statutory BAC threshold. Justice Liu, concurring, agreed with the judgment but would confine the relevance of impairment evidence to rebutting Coffey's rising-BAC theory rather than generally proving a BAC of 0.08 percent or higher.