Illinois DUI Lawyer Blawg
Recently in the news is that former Chicago Blackhawks star Chris Chelios was arrested in Illinois for DUI. As I viewed this online report from the Daily Herald, the following statement from reporter Jim Davis, who had viewed the DUI arrest video caught my eye:
I had heard that the field-sobriety tests are tough to ace, even to someone who might be stone-cold sober. So as Chelios struggled a bit with keeping his arms at his side, balancing on one foot and counting “one one-thousand, two one-thousand …” I was compelled to stand up and try this myself. I didn’t fall, but I wobbled and had to stretch out my arms for balance. And, for the record, I was stone-cold sober at the time.
Most of us have heard of the police asking you to “walk a straight line”. The United States Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has a name for this: Standardized Field Sobriety Test (SFST).
NHTSA defines the SFST as “a battery of three tests administered and evaluated in a standardized manner to obtain validated indicators of impairment and establish probable cause for arrest”. In other words, the officer will ask you to perform three tests, and your performance on those tests will be one of the factors he will use in deciding whether to arrest you for DUI.
The officer will usually capture your performance on the SFST with a video camera situated in his squad car. The three tests are the:
· Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN)
· Walk-and-Turn (WAT)
· One-Leg Stand (OLS)