Interrogation Preceding Field Sobriety Tests

Your Sacramento DUI attorney will check that before the field sobriety test, you underwent a proper police interrogation, which ensures that the officer was able to rule out certain conditions that may affect the test.

As your Sacramento DUI attorney will explain, all field sobriety tests will typically be conducted following an interrogation of the person to be tested. The interrogation itself is essentially a test which will be used by the officer to look for “objective” signs of intoxication, such as the odor of alcohol or slurred speech.

The police will ask you questions before the field sobriety test to discover the following factors.

The police will question you before administering the field sobriety test to make sure that you do not have any preexisting physical impairments that would influence a given field sobriety test.

Thus, if the interrogation reveals that you have bad knees, the officer will not make you take field sobriety tests requiring balancing on the legs.

The police can also establish any signs of mental impairment from alcohol by asking you to tell him what the current date and time is or asking if you understand why you were stopped.

Divided attention is the process used by the brain to perform at least two tasks simultaneously. Because alcohol consumption complicates this process, divided attention tasks can be relied upon to reveal some reduction in ability (without driving impairment) at very low levels.

The officers will use divided attention tests to evaluate your ability to perform the mental and physical multitasking necessary to operate an automobile.

A number of field sobriety tests will evaluate the driver’s divided attention by having the subject to engage in multiple tasks at once. Here are some examples:

• To perform the walk-and-turn test, you must engage in a difficult physical task while following compound instructions.
• To perform the one-leg stand test, you must balance yourself on one foot while counting verbally in thousands.

The interrogation may also use three questioning techniques to search for divided attention:

1. Asking for two things at once, such as for both a driver’s license and the car registration.
2. Asking questions intended to interrupt or distract.
3. Asking strange questions.

Your Sacramento DUI attorney will make sure that the police did not overstep their authority in asking you questions or performing field sobriety tests.

Sacramento DUI attorney Param Pabla has the legal knowledge and experience to obtain your acquittal in your DUI case. Call today at (916) 285-7900 for an initial consultation.