Field Sobriety Tests

[RJM62]

Isn't there some better ways to do field sobriety checks than to ask people to do bizarre things that have nothing to do with driving?

I was talking to a friend of mine who's a deputy sheriff, and he told me that many people who haven't had a thing to drink fail them, but others who are three sheets to the wind can pass them. So what's the point?

I'd think a tablet based app involving tapping moving balls, predicting which of a number of goals a moving ball is going to enter, or blocking balls from entering a goal (as in an arcade game), would be much more accurate and relevant than standing on one foot and picking your left nostril with your right index finger while farting downwind with one eye closed.

Rich

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

"Victimless" still rankles me, though. The accident chain began with the decision to drive while impaired, something that is always avoidable. It's hard to come up with a scenario in which someone had no choice but to drive while intoxicated.

I think “victimless” gets applied because the mere act of driving a car on a public street while intoxicated does not necessarily harm anyone else. And people focus on that label because of cases where someone is charged with a DUI improperly and the standards used are subject to abuse, as noted by many in this thread.

That is of course sort of a over-simplification because it is well established that driving with a BAC above certain limits substantially increases the odds that the driver will hurt someone else.

Sort of an interesting political theoretical question. How dangerous does someone else’s activity have to be to another to justify the other or the state on their behalf coercively intervening before the damage is done?

The standard with respect to using lethal force in self defense is fairly well established. In other areas, less so, and I do think that we have had in our society generally a drift toward a lesser and lesser threat or clarify of threat being used to justify coercion by the state.

OTOH, I think it is fairly clear cut in the case of drunk driving above a certain BAC.