Tampa Bay DUI Field Sobriety Tests: Not Scientifically Reliable
The police cruiser pulls in behind your vehicle, and the officer flips on his lights. You pull over. You roll down your window as the officer approached your driver side door. He asks you if you had anything to drink tonight. Then, he asks you to step out of the car. On the side of the road, he asks you if you would be willing to take his “Field Sobriety Tests”. The officer begins by reading you instructions for the “tests” and then demonstrates what he wants you to perform. The two psychomotor “tests” he will request you to perform are the walk and turn and the one-legged stand. After you perform, the officer will likely conclude that you failed his “tests”, and place you under arrest for DUI.
You retain a Tampa Bay Area Drunk Driving Lawyer. You fight your DUI. At trial many months later, the arresting DUI Officer will tell the jury that he knew you were driving under the influence in no small part because of your performance on his tasks. He will give great weight to the results of his walk and turn and the one-legged stand tasks.
But should a jury?
A Few Studies on Field Sobriety Exercises that every Pasco, Pinellas, or Hillsborough Florida DUI Attorney Should Know:
Preliminarily, understand that to have probable cause of a DUI arrest, a Florida DUI officer must reasonably believe that the individual he is investigating is under the influence of alcohol to the extent that his normal faculties are impaired by the alcohol. Normal faculties include the ability to walk, talk, judge distances, and drive a car.
So how does he do that? How does a DUI officer “quantify” impairment while on scene? What factors, or evidence, articulate that the impairment (if any) observed by the officer was the result of alcohol and not nervousness, injury, handicap, or just a lack of sleep?
A breath, urine or blood test to determine blood alcohol content is not an option. Under Florida Law, an Officer can only request that you take a breathalyzer test after he places you under arrest.
One tool that police officers have been using for the better part of a century can be classified as field sobriety exercises. Previously, they included such tasks as counting your ABC’s backwards and picking up a penny off of the ground.
Eventually, the National Highway Traffic Association, or NHTSA, started to look more closely at the Field Sobriety Tasks. It wanted to see if they could “beef up” the meaning of the Field Sobriety Exercise results. It wanted to turn the tasks into something more standardized, powerful, and reliability. It wanted to see if they could turn the tasks into scientifically reliable tests.
So in the 1970s, NHTSA funded a research project to study field sobriety tests. The studies evaluated whether or not field sobriety tests could predict whether subject was above or below a .10% BAC, the presumptive level of intoxication in California at the time of the studies.
Results of the 1977
Interestingly, NHTSA’s funded research first concluded that the alphabet test and finger to nose test were not recommended for use as sobriety tests because they did not add anything to the predictability of the subject’s influence by alcohol. It is therefore surprising that police officers continue to use both of these exercises today in DUI investigations, considering that the “bible” of Police Officer DUI training comes from the Student Manual published by NHTSA.
Even more interestingly, the officer’s participating in the 1977 study had an error rate of 47%! Of the 101 people that the DUI officer’s concluded were impaired, 47% of them had a blood alcohol content of less than .10 (the legal limit at the time).
So in 1981, NHTSA felt the need to try again. However, the results of this test were not the overwhelming results NHTSA had hoped for to conclude that the field sobriety tests were scientifically valid. Of the 118 individual arrested, 32% were had a blood alcohol content level of under .10.
In 1994, Spurgeon Cole, a clinical psychologist and researcher with Clemson University, performed a study on the Field Sobriety Exercises testing the hypothesis that completely sober people would find the exercises difficult to perform and, as a result, would be judged “impaired by alcohol” by officer’s viewing their performance.
In the Study, Fourteen police officers rated the performance of 21 individuals what had completed the field sobriety tests. The officers had a mean experience level of 11.7 years, and all had completed the state DUI training program and had field experience with DUI detection.
The participants consisted of 10 males and 11 females, between 21 and 55 years of age, with no known disabilities. The participants completed six different field exercises, including the walk and turn, finger to nose, and one legged stand.
The officers watched the performance on video. At the end of the video, all 21 officers were asked to determine, yes or no, if the participants were impaired and should not be driving.
The results?
Of the total of all the DUI officer’s decisions after viewing the participants’ performance in the field sobriety tasks, 46 % were that a participant had had too much to drink. Remarkably, only 3 of the 21 completely sober participants were rated as “unimpaired” by all the officers. Five of the 14 individuals were rated as having “too much to drink” by all 14 of the drunken driving officers involved. Clearly, not the results one would expect from a “scientifically reliable” test.
However, your arresting DUI cop will take the stand and will try to make the psychomotor tasks you took seem as reliable, standardized, and scientific as possible. It is important for your Tampa Bay DUI Attorney to make the appropriate pretrial motions to keep the cop from misleading the jury. If the officer still testifies in a manner that the Jury will view the tasks as scientifically reliable, then your DUI lawyer must be prepared to properly rebut the officer’s testimony at trial, using the very NHTSA manual that your arresting officer was trained on.
