Taimoor Rana is seasoned criminal defense attorney specializing in DUI related cases. He shares his expert legal opinion here « The Police Officer as DUI “Expert”
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- The subjective opinions of the arresting officer are of great importance in the drunk driving case. The officer should have the abilities to correctly assess DUI symptoms of intoxication: observations of driving, personal symptoms (slurred speech, flushed face, etc.), answers to questions, performance on field sobriety tests. Criminal charges will be filed by the prosecutor is legally determined by his DUI report (and his opinion in that report; it is his decision by which it will be decided that whether to suspend the driver’s license or not; the guilt or innocence of the person he arrests will be largely decided by his testimony at trial. So how much expert is the average police officer at judging levels of intoxication in a DUI case?
In order to give the answer to this question, a series of experiments have been conducted by the researchers at Rutger University’s Alcohol Behavior Research Laboratory. In order to compare with officers, two groups of non-police witnesses were first tested. In one, 49 lay social drinkers sat in a room as various subjects have been brought in one at a time for observation and to ask related questions. Some of them have consumed varying amounts of alcohol while the others had consumed nothing; each had been given tests for blood-alcohol levels. Each in turn answered questions that were asked by the lay witnesses until all were finished, then they got up and left. Then each of the 49 witnesses were asked to judge state of sobriety or intoxication of each subject. It was concluded by the researchers that the assumption that social drinkers would prove to be accurate judges…was not confirmed.
In the second group, 12 bartenders were tested by the researchers in the setting of a large cocktail lounge. Again, it has been founded by the researchers that the bartenders correctly rated a target in only one of four instances.
The researchers then move towards 30 experienced DUI officers that belonged to various New Jersey law enforcement agencies. They were also separated into two groups, the first group of 15 officers were tested and all the laboratory conditions were similar to those that were there in the experiment in which lay social drinkers were involved. The second group of 15 were tested under those circumstances that are commonly encountered in a drunk driving traffic stop, at night, with the subject behind the wheel of a car, then that person is asked to step out and perform a series of DUI field sobriety tests.
Results of these tests?
When police observers in the laboratory conditions were compared to social drinkers who had experienced an identical procedure, the researchers did not found any difference in rating accuracy…. Officers that were in the arrest analogue were somewhat more accurate than their colleagues in the laboratory condition but that accuracy is not very much significant
It had been concluded by the scientists that the results of the three experiments described here are not reassuring. They have studied all three of the subject groups — social drinkers, bartenders and police officers — correctly judged targets’ levels of intoxication only 25 percent of the time.
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