WESTERLO — Before she was pulled over early in the morning on June 27, Karen Boas had been cleaning a bathroom, she says, in exchange for work done on her car’s squealing belt. She attributed her droopy eyes to having a long, stressful day, in which she found out she was pregnant and discovered her best friend had been using heroin.

The morning before her arrest, Boas said, she took a fraction of her daily dosage of a depressant, known as Klonopin, prescribed to treat her panic attacks. She spent much of that Thursday on the road, driving her blue Saturn station wagon.

It was her turn that day to be with her 12-year-old son, who lives with his father an hour away. She had promised to stop smoking on his birthday, a few days earlier, but, after he caught her with a cigarette, he wanted to immediately return to his father in Clifton Park.

“Did you feel like maybe you shouldn’t be driving?” Assistant District Attorney Lee Wilson asked Boas in Westerlo Town Court last Monday, where a jury found her guilty of driving while impaired by drugs and failing to stay right, a misdemeanor and an infraction.

“I did not know what the outcome of my day was going to be,” Boas responded.

The jury found Boas, 40, not guilty of the other charges — having a broken muffler, an infraction, and driving while ability impaired by the combined use of drugs, a misdemeanor — for which Albany County Sheriff’s Deputy Philip Milano arrested her. He also charged her with driving with a broken windshield, an infraction, but it was dismissed during the trial, as it wasn’t brought up during testimony.

Boas maintains she did not cross the double yellow line on Route 1 in Westerlo. Milano testified to seeing her cross twice as he drove behind her, though it isn’t apparent on the video filmed from the dashboard of his patrol car. And, since Milano said he could hear her muffler from inside his car, her attorney, Thomas Gabriels, from the Albany County Public Defender’s Office, showed the jury a receipt from a mechanic a few days after Boas’s arrest that described the muffler in good working order.

The jury was charged with finding Boas not guilty of the charges against her, unless the prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she was guilty. Wilson conferred during the trial with Assistant District Attorney Michael Shanley.

When polled by Westerlo Judge Robert Carl, each of the six jurors confirmed agreement with the verdict.

Gabriels told The Enterprise that Carl had denied an earlier motion to hold a probable-cause hearing, where the judge would have ruled on whether or not the evidence used against Boas was obtained without a legal basis.

The jurors — five men of varying ages and one young woman — deliberated privately for more than two hours on Monday, when they were able to watch the video footage from the dashboard camera without audio and video from the booking room. As she waited outside, Boas was in tears.

The jurors were also allowed to make a specific inference, if they determined the facts supported it: that Boas refused to get her blood drawn to test for drugs because she was aware of her guilt.

Boas refused the blood test, she testified, because she passes out at the sight of blood and needles.

“I didn’t want to be stabbed by a needle. I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said in an interview on April 1.

“She was concerned about medications that would show up in the blood result,” Milano testified, adding that the Albany County Sheriff’s Office does not use urine tests.

He read her words during the trial: “I honestly don’t know what to do. I’m not going to have a chemical test done.”

Milano said the signature on a driver’s license represents consent to tests of breath, blood, or urine by police.

Boas did submit to a test of her breath, which indicated that her blood-alcohol content was 0.00.

Outside of court, after the verdict was read, Boas told The Enterprise she would have allowed her blood to be drawn if she had known about the inference of guilt.

She said she will appeal the verdict, continuing to argue that she is innocent.

“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” Boas said Wednesday.

On July 8, Judge Carl is scheduled to sentence Boas, which may include up to a year in jail. But, even if she is on probation in Albany County and not in jail, she expects to be jailed in Greene County for violating her probation from an arrest, three years ago, for possession of stolen property. She said her daughter’s friend stole food from someone while they were camping and brought it to her house, resulting in Boas’s conviction of a misdemeanor; the friend was a minor in her care.

Her probation term was extended after her arrest in Westerlo and she said she was charged with a violation of her probation more than a year ago, when Milano was one of the deputies who responded to a call where Boas drank too much and her daughter called police.

Boas believes Milano was able to identify her through her license plate with a plate reader as he drove behind her in June and remembered her being rude to him the year before.

A phone call seeking comment from Milano was referred to Chief Deputy Michael Monteleone of the sheriff’s Professional Standards Unit, which handles complaints about officers.

“It doesn’t give us anything about the driver. The only thing it will give you is a response to data that's been loaded into it,” like plates that have been reported stolen or associated with an Amber Alert or a suspect at large, Monteleone said of plate readers.

Monteleone said an officer needs probable cause, a reason, to pull someone over in a case like Boas’s, and, reading the arrest report, he noted Milano wrote that he saw her tires crossing the center line and heard a loud exhaust.

When Deputy Milano approached Boas’s car from the passenger side around 1:20 in the morning, he saw a bottle of pills in her purse, according to the arrest report. Milano’s report says Boas said she was aware of exhaust and steering problems with her car.

Milano noted her droopy eyes to Sergeant Philip White, who arrived shortly after Boas was pulled over. That, along with the pill bottle and what Milano described in the arrest report as her glassy and bloodshot eyes, her lack of motor coordination, and her green tongue, were part of the probable cause he listed that led him to ask to take a sample of blood to test for alcohol or drugs.

The green tongue, Milano and White said in court, is a sign of marijuana use. Boas said she had a green tongue ring in her mouth and denies using marijuana.

Boas guessed that her bloodshot eyes were from crying and the hour of the day. She was going to sleep over at the home where she had been cleaning, she said, but she was trying to bring a calling card to her daughter in East Berne. Boas now lives in Palenville.

“She’s pretty open about showing us her medication and stuff,” Milano told White a few steps away from Boas’s car, a conversation recorded by White’s body microphone. “Let’s get her out and see how she acts.”

Boas has several medical problems, including post traumatic stress disorder, carpel tunnel syndrome, vertigo, numbness in her feet, and lethargy, she said. For one test, where she recited the alphabet beyond the letter Milano told her to end with, Boas said she was anxious as a man was trying to get into his driveway where she was standing just as she started the test.

“If somebody had an issue with standing up, or an ankle or leg, or any numbness or medical issues,…additional testing can be accomplished, which would not discriminate against that person,” Monteleone said, unaware of the details of the case.

He went on, “You could do some other testing, which would preclude the use of that limb to develop probable cause for an arrest. And it looks like there were several tests administered.”

Boas went through seven tests before Milano put her in handcuffs. He said she failed all of them, including one, where she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and counted 30 seconds. He testified on Monday that she had eye tremors.

“From my training and experience, it’s highly indicative of using marijuana,” Milano said of fluttering eyelids.

Gabriels told the jury that, before her license was taken away due to her refusal of the blood test, Boas drove herself to her appointments with her probation officer, a “court officer” who is aware of what medications Boas takes.

In the video, Milano explains to Boas what his requirements are, and some of the reasons for taking her through the tests. The audio quality of the booking-room video footage is hardly audible, he acknowledged in testimony, and his body microphone wasn’t working due to “a glitch.” He concluded that was beyond his control.