Forensic Files

Moments into an interview, DUI defense attorney Josh Lee’s pager buzzes. He glances down. “I won’t have to run to that one. It’s just a trash can,” he says. “I think the guys can handle a trash can on fire.”

It’s not the first time his part-time job has interrupted his full-time job. He’s called a judge before to say he would be late to court because he had to put out a fire, literally, at the home of the judge’s bailiff.
In addition to being a lawyer, Lee is a volunteer firefighter and EMT. And the mayor of Vinita, population over 5,000. It’s a lot to juggle, he concedes, but there’s a baseline: “It all comes back to helping people,” he says.

It’s something he’s always done.

Lee’s father was an entrepreneur who always had his hand in one business or another. “He would tell me how much a law degree would have helped him, and I took that to heart,” Lee says. During law school, Lee interned at the Tulsa County DA’s office and started his own firm in 2007 after graduation. Almost 20 years later, he’s built a science-backed DUI practice.

“In a small town, DUIs, divorces, drug possession—that’s what came through the doors,” he says. “After taking a few DUI cases, I realized I enjoyed the challenge of all the forensic science that goes along with it.”

That interest sent him to Axion Analytical Labs and Training Institute in Chicago. There, he learned how to run the chromatography tests used to measure blood alcohol in DUIs. “There weren’t really any blood test experts doing DUI defense in Oklahoma, or the United States,” he says. So he built the expertise from scratch, then started teaching it: The same forensic chromatography classes Lee helped launch are still running today, training lawyers across the country.

Without this niche knowledge, a defense attorney facing an expert witness who testifies to a blood alcohol number has nothing to push back with. “You stand up and you’re like, ‘Are you sure?’ And they’re like, ‘Yep, I’m sure.’ And then you’re just kind of done,” he says. Understanding the machines changes the cross-examination entirely. Lee’s students spend a week with an actual gas chromatograph in the room, running it themselves, so that when a lab claims a result is standard procedure, they can discern whether that’s true.

Lee points to the Massachusetts chemist convicted in 2013 of faking drug test results for years—“dry labbing,” in the field’s term, meaning she never ran the tests at all. “One,” he says. “That’s the number of defense attorneys it would’ve taken to just ask for the data and stop the whole thing. There should be no ‘just trust me’ in science.”

And Lee doesn’t. In one case, he noticed that the lab’s calibration paperwork for its gas chromatograph, which was supposed to be calibrated daily, didn’t match what he knew it should have produced. He pushed for the actual test printouts, not just the summary sheet. After multiple trips back to court, the lab finally turned them over: The “daily” calibrations had been run once, months earlier, and reloaded every day since. “So it looks like the lab ran the test that day, but really, they ran it one time, in August, and our case was in February,” Lee says.

Lee has also built a career on statute. For years, he argued to Oklahoma judges that state law didn’t authorize paramedics to draw blood in DUI arrests, meaning every blood draw performed by a paramedic was invalid. He won the argument every time—the state never appealed. Then, on her last day on the job, the state’s lawyer told Lee why: “You think I want to make bad law?” she said. Her successor appealed, lost, and invalidated every paramedic blood draw in the state on the civil side.

The forensics, the data, the science: It doesn’t erase the human cost of the cases Lee handles, something he says his emergency work won’t let him forget. “We’ve responded to a lot of terrible accidents,” Lee says. “It gives you the perspective of remembering that these are real human beings on all sides. That’s easy to forget for some people in the criminal justice system, because it’s just another folder. It’s just another DUI, it’s just another whatever. It’s easy to fall into that trap.”