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.
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