What To Expect From a DUI Stop in Ocean City
If stopped at a DUI stop in Ocean City here’s what you should expect during a DUI traffic stop. Call today if you want to schedule a consultation with an attorney.
What Happens First After Being Pulled Over For A DUI Stop?
They can expect that the officer would be asking them for their license and their registration for the vehicle. They would need to expect that at that exact moment, the officer is beginning to observe if there is any basis to believe if this person is driving under the influence. The officer is going to be observing the driver for indicators of impairment.
They’re going to want to see what the driver’s eyes look like. They’re going to want to be asking the driver questions because they want to hear if the driver’s speech is slurred when the driver answers. They will also want to see if the driver is having difficulty forming coherent sentences.
And they’re smelling. They are trying to figure out if there’s any sort of odor of alcoholic beverage in their car. So from the moment an officer walks up to the window, they are investigating for a potential DUI.
How Do Police Determine Whether to Make a DUI Arrest?
If the officer has suspicions that the driver is driving under the influence, they will ask the driver to step out of the car and will ask the driver to perform some standardized field sobriety test.
Those tests will include some standardized testing which is three very specific tests that the officers are trained to perform. And then there may be some supplemental tests that are not required but are favored by police officers because they believe the tests can help determine somebody’s level of impairment.
They will ask the person to count backwards from one number to another. Like they may say count back towards from 57 to 32. Or they may ask the person to recite the alphabet, but they’re going to ask them to recite them from the – recite it from the letter L to the letter T.
So there may be a series of tests that the driver would be ask to do. The officer, after observing those tests, may ask the driver to submit to what’s called a preliminary breath test. And that is a small hand held device that an officer carries with them and the person literally blows into a small plastic tube.
That hand held device will give a result, as to how much alcohol is in the person’s system. It is not a scientifically standardized machine. It is not scientifically acceptable enough that it could be used in court. So an officer could never testify as to what the person blew on the PBT.
However, the officer can use it to confirm or deny the suspicion of whether the person is actually under the influence of alcohol. For example, a person may do very, very badly on field sobriety tests. And maybe their coordination is horrible.
But when given the PBT, the person would blow a .00, that would alert the officer that this person hasn’t been drinking alcohol, but there is something else going on here, whether it could be drugs that the person ingested or that the person is dealing with a very serious medical condition.
For example, somebody who has issues with their insulin levels can appear to be intoxicated, when in fact, their blood sugar is too high or too low. So that PBT is just another indicator for an officer to figure out what’s going on.