Alcohol
on the Breath:
Evidence of DUI?
Information
courtesy of Lawrence Taylor - DUIblog
As
any experienced criminal attorney knows, you will never see a DUI
police report that does not say the arrestee had "an odor of
alcohol on his breath" -- usually further characterized as
either a "moderate" or "strong" odor of alcohol.
If the report does not mention an alcoholic breath, you can be sure
the later breath test at the station came back clean -- and the
arrest has been "revised" from DUI alcohol to DUI drugs.
Criminal
attorneys also know the reality of drunk driving investigations:
after stopping a car late at night, the officer approaches the driver’s
window predisposed to finding a drunk driver behind the wheel. It
is a psychological fact that we tend to see what we expect to see.
And the first thing the officer will be looking for to corroborate
his expectations is an odor of alcohol. Once he smells alcohol,
the arrest is a foregone conclusion; the field sobriety tests are
mere formalities, the subjective "pass-fail" decision
made by the already-convinced officer.
Of
course, as I indicated in an earlier post, "The Suspect Had
a Strong Odor of Alcohol on his Breath", alcohol actually has
no odor.
I have
received queries after this post as to whether there are any scientific
studies to back up my claim that breath alcohol odor is largely
irrelevant yet disproportionately weighted as "evidence"
of intoxication. Yes, there is such a study...
In
1999, the same scientists whose federally-contracted studies became
the basis of the so-called "standardized" battery of field
sobriety tests conducted another study on the effectiveness of alochol
odor in detecting intoxication.These researchers used 20 experienced
officers working with 14 subjects who were tested at blood-alcohol
concentrations (BACs) ranging from zero to .13 percent. Over a four-hour
period, the officers smelled the subject’s breath odor under
optimal conditions, with the subjects hidden rom view.
The
conclusions of the study: Odor strength estimates were unrelated
to BAC levels. In fact, estimates of BAC
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