How a Field Sobriety Test Affects Your DUI Case

When an individual is pulled over on suspicion of driving drunk, one of the tests that an officer may ask you to perform is a field sobriety test. Police officers use field sobriety tests as a way of determining whether you are drunk and to defend their reasoning to arrest you for drunk driving. While field sobriety tests may seem like a good way for officers to distinguish drunk drivers from sober ones, the tests have a history of providing faulty evidence.

If you are arrested on DUI charges solely because an officer judged that you were drunk from a field sobriety test, the case against you may be very weak. By their nature, sobriety tests contain a lot of error in their design, administration, and results. Being unable to balance or follow an officer’s instructions exactly is not strong evidence of drunkenness, because a number of other factors could also cause you to fail this kind of test.

When a lawyer begins to help you prepare your defense, he or she will scrutinize all of the evidence against you for weaknesses in the prosecution’s case. Field sobriety tests may provide very weak evidence because they cannot determine whether or not a driver was over or under the .08 BAC legal limit. Instead of definitively calculating a driver’s sobriety, a field sobriety test is simply a subjective test, and the result only indicates whether or not an officer thinks you were drunk. A good lawyer can argue these points and fight against the use of field sobriety evidence in your case.

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Don’t let yourself be convicted based on faulty evidence or an overzealous prosecutor. An experienced DUI defense lawyer can help defend your case against sobriety test results and can protect your rights in a court of law. If you have been arrested on DUI charges, don’t hesitate to contact aggressive, experienced Rhode Island DUI lawyer Matthew Marin today at 401-287-4384 for assistance with your case.