DEFENDING MARYLAND DUI/DWI CASES OUTLINE
by
Leonard R. Stamm
Goldstein & Stamm,
P.A.
Capital Office Park
6301 Ivy Lane, Suite 504
Greenbelt, Maryland
20770
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lstamm@lstamm.com
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Copyright © 2007 - Leonard R. Stamm
A person is intoxicated when a person's mental and physical faculties are impaired to a substantial degree from the use of alcoholic beverages: that is, a person's judgment and nervous system are affected from the use of alcohol to the extent that there is a substantial or significant impairment of coordination. [in relation to driving or operating a motor vehicle, a substantial or significant impairment of coordination exists when, as a result of the use of alcoholic beverages, a person lacks substantial capability to operate a vehicle in a manner that an ordinarily prudent and cautious person in full possession of his faculties, using reasonable care, would operate a vehicle under like conditions.
Aronson, Maryland Criminal Jury Instructions and Commentary, Second Edition (Michie 1988).
"Intoxication" and "impairment by alcohol" are two terms difficult to define with precision, yet not difficult to understand. Courts have been able to fashion interpretations of these terms. Instructive in this respect is the approach employed by an Oklahoma court in Synnott v. State where the appellant made an identical due process challenge. 515 p.2d 1154 (Okla.Cr.App.1973). The court, in upholding an analogous provision, held that the phrase "under the influence of intoxicating liquor" must be given its "commonly understood meaning which does not leave a person of ordinary intelligence in doubt." Because the state is one of general knowledge, it must be given a sensible interpretation. Id. at 1157. Therefore, ascribing to the word "impaired" its common meaning, we believe it is generally viewed as a state less than intoxication where consumption of alcohol has affected one's normal coordination.
Brooks v. State, 41 Md.App. 123, 128, 395 A.2d 1224, 1227 (1979).
Tereshuk v. State, 66 Md. App. 193, 503 A.2d 254 (1986)
Of alcohol
If offered as circumstantial evidence of alcohol
intoxication or impairment, the probative value of the SFSTs
derives from their basic nature as observations of human behavior,
which is not scientific, technical or specialized knowledge. To
interject into this essentially descriptive process technical
terminology regarding the number of "standardized clues"
that should be looked for or opinions of the officer that the
subject "failed" the "test," especially when
such testimony cannot be shown to have resulted from reliable
methodology, unfairly cloaks it with unearned credibility. Any
probative value these terms may have is substantially outweighed
by the danger of unfair prejudice resulting from words that imply
reliability. I therefore hold that when testifying about the SFSTs
a police officer must be limited to describing the procedure
administered and the observations of how the defendant performed
it, without resort to terms such as "test,"
"standardized clues," "pass" or
"fail," unless the government first has established a
foundation that satisfies Rule 702 and the Daubert/Kumho Tire
factors regarding the reliability and validity of the scientific
or technical underpinnings of the NHTSA assertions that there are
a stated number of clues that support an opinion that the suspect
has "failed" the test.
This is not to say that a police officer may not express an
opinion as a lay witness that the defendant was intoxicated or
impaired, if otherwise admissible under Rule 701. As recently
amended, Rule 701 permits lay opinion testimony if: (a) rationally
based upon the perception of the witness, (b) helpful to the fact
finder and (c) if the opinion does not involve scientific,
technical or specialized information.
*
*
*
In DWI/DUI cases, however, the third requirement of Rule 701, that
the lay opinion is "not based on scientific, technical, or
other specialized knowledge," will take on great importance.
A police officer certainly may testify about his or her
observations of a defendant's appearance, coordination, mood,
ability to follow instructions, balance, the presence of the smell
of an alcoholic beverage, as well as the presence of exaggerated
HGN, and the observations of the defendant's performance of the
SFSTs__consistent with the limitations discussed above. The
officer should not, however, be permitted to interject technical
or specialized comments to embellish the opinion based on any
special training or experience he or she has in investigating DWI/DUI
cases. Just where the line should be drawn must be left to the
discretion of the trial judge, but the officer's testimony under
Rule 701 must not be allowed to creep from that of a layperson to
that of an expert__and the line of demarcation is crossed if the
opinion ceases to be based on observation and becomes one founded
on scientific, specialized or technological knowledge.
In his testimony and published writings, Dr. Cole was highly critical of the reliability of the SFSTs if used to prove the precise level of a suspect's alcohol intoxication or impairment. His 1994 article "Field Sobriety Tests: Are They Designed for Failure?," published in the journal Perceptual and Motor Skills, analyzed the 1977 Report, the 1981 Final Report, and the 1983 Field Evaluation report published by NHTSA regarding the SFSTs. (Def's.Memo, Ex. C.).
Dr. Cole observed the following:
(1) 47% of the subjects tested in the 1977 NHTSA laboratory study who would have been arrested by the testing officers for driving while intoxicated (BAC of 0.10 or greater) actually had BACs below 0.10;
(2) in the 1981 Final Report, 32% of the participants in the lab study were incorrectly judged by the testing officers as having BACs of 0.10 or greater; and
(3) the accepted reliability coefficient for standardized clinical tests is . 85 or higher, yet the reliability coefficients for the SFSTs, as reported in the NHTSA studies, ranged from .61 to .72 for the individual tests and .77 for individuals that were tested on two different occasions while dosed to the exact same BAC. More alarmingly, inter-rater reliability rates (where different officers score each subject) ranged from .34 to .60, with an over-all rate of . 57.
Id. at 100.
Dr. Cole theorized that the SFSTs, particularly the WAT and OLS tests, required subjects to perform unfamiliar, unpracticed motions and noted that a very few miscues result in a conclusion that the subject failed and had a BAC in excess of 0.10. Id. His hypothesis was that individuals could be classified as intoxicated/impaired as a result of unfamiliarity with the test, rather than actual BAC. Id. He tested this hypothesis by videotaping twenty_ one completely sober individuals performing either "normal-abilities tests" (such as reciting their addresses or phone numbers or walking in a normal manner) or the WAT and OLS tests. Id. at 99_102. The results of the study were that 46% of the officers that viewed the videotape of the sober individuals performing the SFSTs rated the subjects as having had too much to drink, as compared to only 15% reaching this decision after seeing the videotape of the subjects performing the normal-abilities tests. Id. at 102. Dr. Cole concluded:
[The SFSTs] must be held to the same standards the scientific community would expect of any reliable and valid test of behavior. This study brings the validity of field sobriety tests into question. If law enforcement officials and the courts wish to continue to use field sobriety tests as evidence of driving impairment, then further study needs to be conducted addressing the direct relationship of performance on these and other tests with driving. To date, research has concentrated on the relationship between test performance and BAC and officers' perception of impairment. This study indicates that these perceptions may be faulty.
Id. at 103.
During his testimony at the Rule 104(a) hearing, Dr. Cole repeated his criticism of the reliability of the 1977, 1981 and 1983 studies but also testified about the Colorado, Florida and San Diego studies performed by Dr. Burns, styled as "field validation studies ." This testimony echoed Dr. Cole's written criticisms about the SFSTs' reliability as precise predictors of the level of alcohol intoxication and the SFST's validity as a measure of driver impairment in his 1994 article, co-authored with Ronald H. Nowaczyk, titled "Separating Myth from Fact: A Review of Research on the Field Sobriety Tests" and published in the Champion journal of the South Carolina Bar Association. Def's. Reply Memo, Exh. 1.
Dr. Cole's primary criticisms, as discussed in his 1994 article, include, first, that the 1981 Final Report published by NHTSA claims an 80% accuracy rate for users of the SFSTs. This is misleading because when the actual data is examined with respect to the success rate of using the SFSTs to differentiate between drivers with BACs above 0.10 and those without, the critical population, the officers had "a 50/50 chance of being correct just on the basis of guessing." Id. at 539.
Second, the SFSTs have a combined test-retest reliability rates of .77, while the scientific community "expects reliability coefficients to be in the upper . 80s or .90 for a test to be scientifically reliable." Id. at 540. When different officers tested the same subjects at the same BAC dose level on different days the reliability was only .59 - a 41% error rate. Dr. Cole contrasted these substandard reliability coefficients with that of the BAC machine, which is .96 or 96% reliable. Id. at 540-41.
Third, Dr. Cole argued that in order for the SFSTs to be valid predictors of BAC they must "not only identify individuals above a BAC level of 0.10 as 'failing', but also identify individuals below .10 as 'passing'." Id. at 541. The data from the NHTSA 1977 Report, however, shows that the validity of the HGN, OLS and WAT SFSTs was ".67, .48, and .55, respectively, with a combined validity coefficient of .67." Id. This means that use of the SFSTs results in an unacceptably high erroneous arrest rate, if the tests are used by the officer to make arrest decisions based on BAC levels being in excess of . 10.
Fourth, Dr. Cole was particularly critical of claims that the NHTSA SFSTs have been "validated" in a "field setting." In this regard, he stated that the 1977 and 1981 NHTSA studies were done in a laboratory setting, and the difference in conditions in a controlled lab are dramatically dissimilar from field conditions that can be expected when officers employ SFSTs at all times of day and night in widely disparate weather and traffic conditions and where issues of officer safety may influence how the test is performed. [FN20] Id. at 542. Dr. Cole stated that the NHTSA 1983 Field Evaluation purported to be a field validation study, but it failed to meet the recommendations of the authors of the NHTSA 1981 Final Report that the SFSTs be validated in the field for eighteen months in locations across the country. Id. Dr. Cole also stated that Dr. Burns herself has testified that the SFSTs adequately have not been field tested [FN21] Id.
Finally, Dr. Cole disputed the claims of proponents of the SFSTs that the studies regarding them have been published in peer review journals. The 1977 and 1981 field studies were published in technical reports by NHTSA, but those reports excluded the "methods and results" sections because they were thought to be too lengthy. Id. at 543. Cole concluded "[i]t is difficult to see how the NHTSA could claim that the FST is accepted in the scientific community, when results of studies on the validation of the FST have never appeared in a scientific peer reviewed journal, which is a basic requirement for acceptance by the scientific community." Id . Cole concluded:
Because of its widespread use, the FST battery has been assumed to be a reliable and valid predictor of driving impairment. NHTSA has done little to dispel that assumption. Law enforcement cannot be blamed for its use of the FST battery. Training documents refer to NHTSA reports and provide what appears to be supporting evidence for the validity of the FST battery. In addition, there is little doubt that individuals who have high BAC levels will have difficulty in performing the FST battery. However, what the law enforcement community and the courts fail to realize is that the FST battery may mislead the officer on the road to incorrectly judge individuals who are not impaired. The FST battery to be valid must discriminate accurately between the impaired and non-impaired driver. NHTSA's own research on that issue ... has not been subjected to peer review by the scientific community. In addition, a careful reading of the reports themselves provides support for the inadequacy of the FST battery. The reports include low reliability estimates for the tests, false arrest rates between 32 and 46.5 percent, and a field test of the FST that was flawed because the officers in many cases had breathalyzer results at the time of the arrest. NHTSA clearly ignored the printed recommendations of its own researchers in conducting that field study.
Id. at 546. (Emphasis in original).
State v. Homan, 732 N.E.2d 952 (Oh. 2000)(standardized field sobriety tests inadmissible for probable cause unless conducted in strict compliance with NHTSA guidelines)(the Ohio legislature has since modified this rule)
Ragland v. State, 385 Md. 706, 870 A.2d 609 (2005)("Expert opinion testimony" is testimony that is based on specialized knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education)
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DRUG RECOGNITION AND EVALUATION MATERIALS
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Preliminary Training for Drug Evaluation and Classification "The Pre-School" Student Manual
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The following are experts on the subject of field sobriety tests:
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