Field Sobriety Tests in DUI Cases
3 Things You Need to Know About the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests in DUI Cases
When a police officer is conducting an investigation into a possible DUI or DWI, one of the first things he does is ask the driver to perform some Field Sobriety Tests. There are all sorts of Field Sobriety Tests, but the most important ones are called Standardized or Standardized Field Sobriety Tests. We call them SFSTs for short. There are three such tests. The first is the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus or HGN the second is the One Leg Stand. The third is the Walk and Turn test.
Now, I’m not real fond of referring to them as quote-unquote “tests” because the exercises the cops had you perform are really nothing like tests in the normal understanding of the word. A real test is specifically designed to segregate a population, or to place different people into different categories based on their results on the tests.
So, for example if a teacher gives her class a test, the point of it is to figure out who learned a lot in the class and who didn’t, right? Some people have learned a lot and they’re going to get an A on the test and others will have learned only a little bit and they’ll likely fail the test. So, the purpose of the test is to learn something about the person taking the test. To find out how to classify that person.
If the Standardized Field Sobriety Tests were true tests, in the normal sense of the word, they would help cops classify who is drunk, and who is not. Who should be arrested for a DUI, and who should be let go.
The SFSTs must not only identify people who are too drunk to drive as failing the test. They must also identify people who are sober enough to drive as passing the test. But, the problem is, they don’t do that. They don’t do the job they are supposed to do.
So, here’s everything you need to know about Standardized Field Sobriety Tests. Here it comes, you ready? They don’t work. Period. That is it. That is the end of the story.
Let me explain why I say they don’t work. And, I’m not alone, by the way. There are numerous scientists, researchers and professors who agree the SFSTs don’t work. I didn’t come up with this. I’m just telling you what the experts have found to be true.
There have been multiple studies done on the SFSTs and how accurate or inaccurate they are in helping a cop determine whether someone is driving under the influence of alcohol. Let’s go over three of these studies.
San Diego DUI Attorney Explains Field Sobriety Tests
In a 1977 study, the researchers were determining whether police officers should have arrested someone. The officers’ decision to arrest or not arrest someone were based on the person’s performance on the SFSTs. The researchers basically said, “Okay, the cop thought this guy failed the SFSTs. Let’s look at what the guy’s BAC level was, and see if his BAC was high enough to get him arrested. If it was, the cop made the right decision to arrest him.
You know what the researchers found? There was an error rate of 46.5% in the making arrest. That means that almost half of the people who the cops determined failed the tests based on their SFSTs should not have been arrested because, based on their BAC, they were not too drunk to drive. Therefore, the individuals’ performance on the SFSTs did not give the cops an accurate indication as to whether or not they had a BAC that was above the limit.
In a 1991 study, police officers watched a group of people perform the SFSTs. But the officers were not told how much alcohol the people had to drink before performing the tests. After the cops watched the people perform the tests the cops would then indicate whether they thought that the people were too drunk to drive based on how they thought the people did on the tests. 46% of the officers’ responses indicated they would have arrested the individuals…all of whom were completely sober.
Lastly, a 1985 study found false positive rates for totally alcohol free participants to be as high as 54% for some police departments.
Think about this. There was a group of people who were totally sober performing the SFSTs, and the cops would have arrested half of them, because the cops thought they were drunk. What that means is even after a cop watches someone perform the SFSTs, the officer still doesn’t have a clue about whether or not the person is drunk. No clue at all.
In the eyes of the officers, the people who are stone cold sober perform just as poorly on the SFSTs as the person who really is drunk and really shouldn’t be driving. The cops might as well have flipped a coin and called heads or tails because even if you have never had a drink of alcohol in your life, you still have a 50/50 shot of being arrested for a DUI after performing the SFSTs.
Now, let’s go back to the example of a classroom taking a test. Let’s say a teacher writes up a test and has her class take it. There are some students in the class who never went to class, never did any homework, never read a single word in the textbook, and just didn’t learn anything in the whole course. There are other students who attended every class, they completed every single homework assignment, they got all of the questions right on the pop quizzes, they read the entire textbook from cover to cover, and they learned everything they were supposed to learn in the course. Now, this teacher hands out a test. If the test is anything like the SFSTs, it would mean that the straight-A student would be just as likely to fail the test as the student who didn’t learn a single thing in the entire course.
What does that tell us? The problem isn’t with the student; it’s with the test itself.
It’s not a fair test, and it shouldn’t be used because it results in a huge injustice for the student who really did learn everything that was taught in the class. In fact, it shouldn’t even be called a test because it doesn’t even really test anything or anyone. It doesn’t separate the students who learned a lot form the students who learned nothing at all.
Like the hypothetical test in the classroom, the SFSTs should not be used at all. They shouldn’t be used by law enforcement when deciding whether to arrest someone for a crime, in my opinion. They certainly shouldn’t be relied upon by a jury deciding whether to convict someone of a crime. And your lawyer needs to be able to help a jury see that.
To sum it all up, the 1977 study, the 1991 study and the 1985 study, all show that the SFSTs are completely worthless.
So, remember that even if you failed every one of the tests that you performed, that is not evidence that you were drunk.
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