1.32 blood per mille Traffic offender convicted after schnapps chocolate excuse
November 8, 2024, 6:28 p.m. Listen to article
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In the Taunus, the traffic police stopped a man who had a high alcohol level. In court, he claims that he unknowingly ate some schnapps chocolates to combat hypoglycemia and didn’t notice anything. The judges ruled against him that only an enormous amount of chocolates would have resulted in such a value.
The Frankfurt am Main district court has condemned as unreliable a man’s claim that he accidentally became drunk by eating schnapps chocolates. Accordingly, the defendant would have had to drink the 1.32 per mille alcohol measured in his blood, around 0.2 to 0.3 liters of hard liquor, in order to arrive at the measured value. The court ruled that this would correspond to at least 132 kirsch pralines from a well-known brand.
The defendant was driving his car through Hofheim am Taunus on a January night with 1.32 per mille of alcohol in his blood and was stopped. The district court therefore sentenced him to a fine for intentional drunken driving and confiscated his driver’s license.
The defendant had previously stated in the trial that he fell asleep in the car in the parking lot with hypoglycemia after visiting the sauna. An unknown couple offered him a bag of chocolates about the size of a table tennis ball and probably filled with vodka. He ate eight or nine of them. He didn’t notice that the treats were filled with alcohol.
“Absolutely far-fetched” not to have noticed alcohol
The court classified this claim as unreliable. Even taking into account the fact that he had eaten chocolates that were the size of table tennis balls, and even if he had eaten twelve instead of nine, they would still have been more than two centilitres of a 40 liter per mille for his measured blood alcohol level of 1.32. According to the assessment, they must contain 100% alcohol.
The judges found it doubtful whether such a product could still be called a praline. Given this amount, it is “absolutely unlikely” that the defendant did not notice the alcohol content.
