NHTSA's Role In Field Sobriety Testing

Why The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is Involved, and How It Affects You.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is an agency of the Department of Transportation.   It was developed by the executive branch of the U.S. government.  It's mission is to "save lives, prevent injuries and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes, through education, research, safety standards and enforcement activity."

In efforts to achieve it's "mission," one major role for NHTSA is to write standards and guidelines for police officers to follow in order to keep our roads safe.  NHTSA has spent millions of its tax grant dollars researching and developing "tests" they think are the most effective way for officers to determine and measure impairment of drivers.  Although many "tests" can be used, only 3 are approved and encouraged by NHTSA.  They are the Walk and Turn, the One-Leg Stand, and the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus (HGN).

What does "approved" mean? Prosecutors try to claim that because these exercises are promulgated by NHTSA, that means they are "standardized."  The problem with calling them standardized is that to a jury, it makes them sound as though they are uniformly administered in the field, which could not be further from the truth.  Each individual officer is taught to administer them differently, and in turn, they go on to train other officers and teach them their way of administering it.  Thus, everywhere in the United States officers are all administering these exercises to suspects in the field, but because they are all doing it differently, they will all obtain different results.  That's not uniform at all!

Why these three exercises and not others? The reason why NHTSA encourages use of the Walk & Turn, The One-Leg Stand, and the HGN is because they believe these three exercises are the most reliable way to measure levels of impairment (according to their limited and skewed research).  NHTSA is not entirely off - when performed correctly by experienced and well-trained physicians, these exercises can and are commonly used to discover many medical problems.  The HGN test is used by doctors to diagnose neurological disorders and brain tumors, and the Walk & Turn and One-Leg Stand can be used to determine other common medical issues as well.

But wait, police officers aren't doctors! That's right, they're not!   Neurologists spend years in medical school and training in hospitals in order to accurately administer and interpret these exercises.  Police officers, on the other hand,  only receive ONE DAY of training, and guess who they are taught by?  Not doctors!  Other officers!  So you can only imagine how inaccurate and unreliable these tests really are.

Hopefully by now you are beginning to understand that even without many of the other issues that may arise, the tests themselves are already unreliable ways to test impairment because they are administered to you by inexperienced and unqualified police officers.  Add in other factors, such as medications you may be taking, outside influences and distractions to skew the results, and medical problems or conditions that may affect your performance, and it is clear that the correlation between performance and impairment is nearly impossible to accurately measure.

What about the other "tests" that are not NHTSA "approved?" Good question.  Although NHTSA encourages the use of only the three exercises mentioned above, many jurisdictions all over the United States still use other exercises in attempts to measure your level of impairment:

The scary part about all this is that your performance of any of these exercises will be used against you - not only in the officer's decision whether to arrest you, but also in court when the prosecutor is trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you were DUI.  That is why for those of you facing DUI charges that submitted to the exercises, it is imperative that you contact an experienced attorney in your state immediately for help formulating and preparing your defense.