It seems to me that in the US, the first test any police officer instigates for a potential DUI is to have the driver complete a sobriety test, the walk in a straight line, backwards alphabet, etc, etc. Correct me if I’m wrong here on this assumption!
I have always wondered why bother with a test which to me seems like the results could vary greatly depending upon an individuals capacity to handle alcohol.
In Australia, the first step is to pull out a hand-held breathalyser. The cops here don’t even bother with a sobriety test, why would you when inside 30 seconds you can get a reasonably accurate blood alcohol reading, which will tell you straight away if the person is over the limit or not.
So why don’t the cops in America put more reliance on hand held breathlyser’s? Why go through the rigmarole of a sobriety test?
The only thing I’ve got is what laws have been passed in Australia covering providing samples and reasonable suspicion maybe? (i.e. Australian cops need no ‘reasonable’ suspicion to breathalyse you and failure to provide a sample carries a penalty very similair to an actual DUI)
Wouldn’t this be one of the main reasons why they don’t use a breathalyser? IOW, a breathalyser doesn’t discriminate between different peoples’ ability/capacity to handle alcohol.
The answer to that question is complicated and depends on Constitutional, state, and federal law. The police can’t just go around giving everyone a breathalyzer test whenever they feel like it. They need a reason to do it in the first place and field sobriety test is the best way to have justification. Even when they have justification to give a test at the police station, the standards are still very high and paying lots of money for a good lawyer to challenge everything can still beat it much of the time. Hand-held monitoring tests used by the police simply aren’t compatible with the American judicial system.
Actually my experience is that the hand held breathalyzer is just used as justification to take you in to the station for a proper test. I was pulled over a few years back and given a breathalyzer test, I was over the limit but the cop told me that by the time we got to the station and did the official test I’d probably be ok, so I was sent on my way.
Well the legal alcohol limit doesn’t allow for that either, and a field sobriety test doesn’t account for someone’s natural coordination.
The police videotape you when you’re performing the sobriety tests. They’ve already decided to arrest you at that point, but they’re gathering evidence to use against you. You can refuse the sobriety tests with no legal consequence.
This is common information which is found on many dui law firms’ web sites.
Varies from country to country, but as in Australia, in Canada police can use roadside screening devices. As you say, there has to be explicit statutory authority for the devices, and a requirement that the driver provide a sample. That approach has been upheld by our Supreme Court.
The key, as 1920s Style “Death Ray” points out, is that such laws don’t make the results of the screening test admissible as proof of .08. Rather, if the motorist fails the screening test, that gives the officer probable cause to believe the motorist is driving over 80, and then can make the statutory demand that the motorist provide a breath sample at the depot in a full-blown breathalyser, in a controlled setting. The results of that breathalyser test can be admitted in court as evidence of the motorist’s blood alcohol level.
Nonetheless, police in Canada do sometimes use sobriety tests, because of the cost of ensuring every police car always has a screening device. If for whatever reason a police officer doesn’t have a functioning screening device, they still need to have a way to investigate a possible case of a driver over 80. Sobriety tests provide a way for the police to make a roadside assessment that may be sufficient to make the demand for a breath sample for analysis.
The Supreme Court of Canada has upheld the use of sobriety tests for this screening purpose: R. v. Orbanski; R. v Elias.. Note that the officer’s observations of the sobriety tests cannot themselves be used as proof of impairment, but only as evidence supporting a demand for a breath sample.
For the U.S., the long and short of it is that (1) not all law enforcement agencies have them and (2) the results are frequently inadmissable. Remember, they’re not just evaluating you, they’re gathering evidence for your trial. The portable breath test (PBT) isn’t as accurate as the intoxilyzer screening devices they use once they get you to the jail, and in most states PBT results are either inadmissable or only admissable to show probable cause for the arrest, not to show blood alcohol level.
So, say you’re a law enforcement officer making an arrest for someone you pulled over for a bad brake light that you believe to be intoxicated. You give the subject a PBT and he shows to be over the limit, so you go ahead and take him to jail and don’t bother with the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFSTs). Once at the jail he refuses the intoxilyzer. Now you have almost no evidence against him other than your claim that he “smelled like alcohol,” and his defense attorney is going to have a field day with your failure to administer the SFSTs.
In most states, you can be arrested and found guilty of drunk driving even with a BAC less than .08 or whatever the legal limit is. Anyone with a BAC above that limit is automatically considered drunk, but someone below the limit is not automatically considered sober. A smaller person, or a woman, or someone who’s just never built up a tolerance, might still be sufficiently impaired that it’s dangerous for them to drive, below that limit.
I guess that is a big difference, In Australia there are penalties for refusing to be tested, and those penalties are often of a similar level as being convicted of DUI anyway.
I think this gets to the core of the difference between the Australian and US attitudes. “Field Sobriety Tests” don’t exist here - a hand-held breathalyzer is the way the police gather evidence about whether you’re drunk or not.
It’s not immediately obvious to me why standing on one leg and touching the tip of your nose, or whatever it is, should be more accurate than blowing in a bag. Also, general consensus in recent threads seems to be that you’re allowed to refuse to do Field Sobriety Tests too, so the two methods seem equal in that respect.
It is called DUI- driving under the influence. It could be the influence of anything besides alcohol, like drugs, etc. Walking a straight line and such finds out if you’re impaired by something, which the breathalizer would miss.
I guess they want to get all impaired drivers off the road, not just drunks. Too bad they don’t have a test for stupid.
In Queensland in the last 12 months or so, the police have introduced a test for drivers under the influence of illicit drugs.
I understand it requires a small plastic tab to be run over your tongue, and will detect if you’ve been using illicit drugs. The list it detects is
[ul]
[li]THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannibinol)—the active ingredient in cannabis/marijuana [/li][li]Methylamphetamine—also known as speed and ice [/li][li]MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine)—the active ingredient in ecstasy.[/li][/ul]
It’s zero tolerance for the drug driving, so any trace and you’re gone.
This seems incredibly easy to abuse to me. If a policeman declares you drunk, based on his personal judgment, what recourse do you have to appeal it? I wonder if anyone’s been convicted of being impaired and then blown a 0.0?
“Ability to handle alcohol”, in the sense of being able to pass a sobriety test, correlates very, very poorly to ability to drive. BAC correlates very well to abiity to drive.
The nebulous “ability to handle alcohol” is based upon a person’s ability to sense a single symptom of alcohol poisoning, loss fo co-ordination, and to compensate for that by taking exagerated care. A novice drinker won’t realise they are intoxicated and will act normally, an experienced drinker will be well aware of it and will try to counteract it.
Ability to drive is based in large part upon reaction time and attention to detail. Alcohol affects both those things, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to compensate for it. If you have a BAC of .08 then you will hit the breaks 1/4 second slower than someone with a BAC of .0001, doesn’t matter how experienced you are. Ditto with ability to process peripheral vision.