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We’ve each and every one seen them. Field sobriety examinations. We are made to trust they let police officers to know when the common Joe is overly drunk to drive his vehicle. Classic examinations include horizontal gaze nystagmus, walk and turn, one leg stand, counting backwords, pat your nose, and state the alphabet. If you’ve never witnessed a police officer give the tests, you most likely performed them in university at a fraternity event. But what do they really confirm? Read on to realize, not a whole lot.
To listen to a officer convey it, the failure of field sobriety tests is concrete evidence that somebody is overly under the influence to drive. If you can’t pace nine steps heel to toe and turn around and take nine more steps you must be intoxicated, right? Wrong. In actuality field sobriety examinations inform police one thing – the likelihood that somebody has consumed alcohol.
Let’s say you are driving around in Seattle minding your own business. It is late at night and you get disoriented. A Seattle cop pulls you over for failing to turn in a flawless half circle (or several other illogical infringement) and inquires if you’ve had something to drink. You state no. This is when the officer asks you to take the field sobriety examinations – I mean, “if you have not been drinking you should be competent to pass them right (even though in Seattle and Kirkland and everywhere else in Washington State you can decline to take field sobriety examinations as part of your constitutional right to remain silent)?”
He asks you to perform three examinations: the walk and turn, the one leg stand, and the horizontal gaze nystagmus. You do your finest, and he arrests you for DUI! How did this ensue? There are a couple of reasons (in addition to you should have called your DUI attorney in Seattle). First, the police officer has a predilection to assume you are intoxicated. He wouldn’t ask you to conduct the field sobriety examinations unless he previously had various suggestion that you were intoxicated driving. Second, even if you do every one of the tests stone cold sober, there is around a 17% chance that you will have been found to have failed!