Question: The other night I was coming home from my company's cigar
and bourbon party in midtown Atlanta. It was a blast - good cigars and
top notch bourbon. Problem is that I was stopped for failure to maintain
lane as I was coming home and was arrested for
DUI . I tried to do the
field sobriety tests but I didn't do well on the walk and turn part because I broke my
ankle playing tennis in an ALTA tennis league a little while ago. Does
it help my case that my ankle was hurt?
Answer: First off, cigar and bourbon nights can be a lot of fun and they
are gaining in popularity. A good cigar, like a Macanudo, Arturo Fuente,
H. Upmann, Ashton, Partagas, CAO, Cohiba, Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta
or El Rey de Mundocan be quite enjoyable, especially when coupled with
a good bourbon like Maker's Mark, Jack Daniel's, Knob Creek, Woodford
Reserve, Elijah Craig, Pappy van Winkle, Bulleit, Jim Beam, Evan Williams,
or Wild Turkey.
The walk and turn test or nine step test or
DUI walk test, as it is also known, is a way for a police officer to judge
a person's apparent intoxication. The test was developed by the NHTSA,
a Federal agency, and officers look for things like balance, starting
too soon, taking the correct number of steps & touching of heel to
toe. The test is considered to be accurate at a rate of about 68% and
is considered almost as accurate for
DUI as the
HGN test (horizontal gaze nystagmus).
If you told the police officer (or deputy sheriff or Georgia state trooper,
as the case may be) that you were physically injured, that would very
likely mean that the walk and turn test would not be as accurate as if
you were totally healthy. If you did not mention your injury to the officer
(and they usually do ask about prior injuries), that could be a problem
because a juror or judge in a
DUI case may think that you did not mention it because you have healed and
are bringing it up later as an excuse for poor performance on the field
sobriety test.
So, in short, yes it may help your case if you can show that you were injured
when you did the walk and turn test and it was that injury, not intoxication,
that caused your poor performance.