Reader’s Question:

I wanna know if police officers in Owensboro, Kentucky use the same standards in field sobriety testing. Are these officers trained in conducting these different kinds of tests?

Lars

Owensboro, KY

To tell you frankly, Lars, believe it or not, although they should have, there are no standards in the state of Kentucky governing field sobriety testing. Police officers in Owensboro, Kentucky definitely receive training every so often that includes field sobriety training, but it seems that such training is clumsy and haphazard at best. Indeed, experienced DUI lawyers would quickly learn that individual police officers use a wide variety of tests different from one another and they administer each test rather differently. This is true even among police officers from the same department.

The most common field sobriety tests conducted in Kentucky are the walk and turn test, the one-leg stand, horizontal gaze nystagmus test, the finger touch test, the nose touch test, the numbers test, the alphabet test and the preliminary breath test. Generally, a police officer would offer three of the tests, plus preliminary breath test.

Tags: breath test, DUI, DUI lawyer, field sobriety tests