A Brewer man was sentenced Monday in Bangor to charges stemming from a fatal crash two years ago, but the most serious allegations were dismissed because of the way his blood was drawn for a sample.

Danny Hilton, 30, will spend just over six months in Penobscot County Jail for reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon, a felony, and operating a motor vehicle after license suspension, a misdemeanor, in connection with a head-on crash near the Brewer-Holden town line. The collision at the intersection of Route 1A and Interstate 395 killed 20-year-old Kristen Kim Woods.

Hilton was sentenced in Penobscot County Superior Court just after he pleaded no contest. All but 190 days of a two-year sentence on the reckless-conduct charge was suspended, and he was ordered to an additional year on probation. On the license-suspension charge, he received a concurrent seven-day jail term and a $350 fine, payable during the first 10 months of his probation.

Besides the OAS charge, Hilton originally faced prosecution for alleged manslaughter, operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor and aggravated OUI as a result of the Aug. 16, 1988, crash. But a judge’s refusal to allow as evidence the results of two blood tests on Hilton led the District Attorney’s Office to dismiss the latter three charges and replace them with the reckless-conduct allegation.

The blood tests showed that several hours after the accident, Hilton had a blood-alcohol content between 0.05 and 0.03 percent. District Attorney R. Christopher Almy had hoped to use a method known as “reverse extrapolation” to show that Hilton’s blood-alcohol content at the time of the accident exceeded the state’s intoxication threshold of 0.08 percent.

According to court documents, Hilton’s lawyer, J. Hilary Billings, challenged the admission of the test results on several fronts, among them the state’s failure to show that the syringes a nurse at St. Joseph Hospital used to draw Hilton’s blood were sterile.

The nurse did not know at the time that a standard kit approved by the Department of Human Services was available at the time and instead used the hospital’s syringes. Those came in prepackaged groups of 50 and were sterilized by the manufacturer rather than the hospital, according to Justice Jack O. Smith’s ruling last month that favored Hilton. She later transferred the second blood sample into an approved test tube.

Smith ruled that the state had provided no evidence substantiating the manufacturer’s sterilization procedure, failed to verify either the manufacturer or the specific type of syringe, and showed no evidence explaining the significance of lot numbers associated with the syringes used.

The judge did not act on the defense objection to the “reverse extrapolation” method and its challenge of the state’s claim that Hilton’s driving could have been impaired with a blood-alcohol level below 0.05 percent. Smith wrote that his decision on the defense’s test-reliability pre-empted the need for him to act on those matters.