Florida DUI Investigations and Roadside Sobriety Exercises

Roadside sobriety exercises are a critical part of a majority of DUI cases. Roadside sobriety exercises is the common name for the "National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration Standardized Field Sobriety Tests." Otherwise abbreviated NHTSA SFST's.

The most important thing that anybody should be told about the SFST's is that, under Florida Law, there isn't a requirement for you to perform the exercises. A good portion of experienced DUI attorneys will state the SFST's are designed to fail and nearly impossible to pass with a .000 blood alcohol level. This is a difficult proposition for many people to believe. Society, specifically members of the jury, through television and other sources of information are indoctrinated to believe that the roadside sobriety exercises accurately determine who's impaired.

If done correctly in a closed setting, roadside sobriety exercises may be fairly accurate in determining who is too impaired to safely operate a motor vehicle. Indeed, the cops that have to learn how to give the instructions are taught in a classroom setting. The class which teaches the police officers the way to properly administer the roadside sobriety exercises is a 3 day class. This highlights a fundamentally unfair proposition. Why do the cops get three full days of classroom instruction complete with live exercises so they can get the roadsides correct? A driver doesn't get three full days. The police expect near perfection from the driver at 3:00am on a Saturday morning on the side of the road while it is raining. Not just is it not fair, but it clearly illustrates the proposition that the tests are designed to fail.

There are only 3 roadside sobriety exercises that are correlated to impairment and recognized by the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration. Those three tests are the walk and turn; the one leg stand and the horizontal gaze nystagmus test. These tests are "standardized" meaning the tests must be conducted the very same way every single time under the proper conditions to ensure that the results to have any validity to a DUI case.

A DUI Attorney must always look into the multiple variables that effected the outcome of the test. The police are trained to minimize the impact of these variables, but the effect can usually not be completely eliminated. For instance, the horizontal gaze nystagmus test can be severely effected and the results rendered useless thanks to lights passing through the field of vision. This is known as an optokinetic nystagmus and is a unique type of horizontal gaze nystagmus. Most police officers are trained to appreciate the possibility for an optokinetic nystagmus and will turn off their overhead emergency lights during a DUI investigation. However, there is almost no way to avoid an optokinetic nystagmus if ever the DUI investigation is happening on a busy road in the night. The issues are simply too numerous to overcome. Headlights traveling through the field of vision, shadows created by passing lights and also the shadows contrasting with the lights will likely render the test inaccurate at best.

A crucial variable for the walk and turn test is whether or not the surface selected for the test is flat and level. Often an officer's report will state the exercises were performed on a "flat and level surface." However, it is often a good idea to investigate the exact location despite what is in the officer's report and despite what might seem like a flat and level surface in the DUI video. A good way to investigate is simply to put a tennis ball on the surface where the DUI investigation took place. To the surprise of many people the tennis ball starts to roll away indicating that the surface was not flat and level.

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