Taimoor Rana is seasoned criminal defense attorney specializing in DUI related cases. He shares his expert legal opinion here « Are Field Sobriety Tests Accurate?
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- The accuracy of Field Sobriety Tests (FSTs) cannot be guaranteed as there are many other factors that also affect a person’s behavior.
Whether a person is arrested, gets charged, or gets his license revoked at the DMV hearing is all largely dependant on the police officer’s judgment. The probability of a conviction is also strongly dependent on the police officer’s testimony, as well as the contents of the police report.
And the officer’s judgment in turn depends on how well a person does on a FST. A person’s performance on an FST could make him innocent or get him arrested. In order to be reasonable and fair, police officers should be good at judging the results of these tests.
This is what most people assume. Trusting the police officer, most people see a failed a FST person as guilty. This assumption is understandable given the stereotypical scenario that most people have in their heads: a guy who, when asked to walk a line, wobbles along before falling flat on his face (hiccupping the whole time) must be drunk.
However, police officers are also human beings and are prone to mistakes. To find out the trustworthiness of police officer’s decisions, Dr. Spurgeon Cole of Clemson University decided to do an experiment.
This experiment was conducted to find out how good police officers were at distinguishing someone who was under the legal limit from someone who was too drunk to drive, based entirely on watching them perform field sobriety tests. The experiment included 14 police officers, who were shown videotapes of 21 subjects taking six common field sobriety tests and were asked to decide which “had too much to drink and drive.” On average, the police officers determined that 46% of the subjects were legally intoxicated.
You will be surprised by the result. Not a single subject had consumed alcohol. In other words, the blood alcohol level of every subject was .00%, and was perceived wrongly by the police officers.
Field sobriety tests have little to no scientific basis. Although it might sound unfair or exaggerated, the legitimate scientific studies on field sobriety tests point towards an unsettling conclusion: field sobriety tests are designed to make people fail.
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