Question: What are police looking for when investigating a DUI in Savannah?
Answer: There are so many different subjective behaviors that the police will look for when they’re trying to find whether a person is DUI. Normally it will start with the usual, “Their eyes were glassy and I detected the presence of alcohol.” And I’ve never once seen a DUI where an officer said that he did not detect the presence of alcohol; it is just one of the most common things that they say, because it’s completely subjective. So, they immediately do that, immediately, if someone admits if they’ve had any alcohol to drink at all, then the officer will spend the next 30 minutes to an hour basically building a case for DUI. Because he knows then that he’s got someone who admittedly has alcohol in their system and all he has to do is use subjective tests to just show that they’re less safe to drive or that they’re DUI. So then he’ll look at stuff like whether or not someone’s steady on their feet, whether or not someone is leaning against a car. Little things that people don’t realize. It could be stumbling, it could be slurring your speech. Anything like that. And sometimes it’s things that are perfectly explainable. I’ve had a lot of cases where my clients were pulled over and they were just tired. And I have clients that work the late shift and it’s four o’clock in the morning and they haven’t slept all night, of course their eyes are blood shot, of course they’re watery. But those kind of things, a police officer is going to use to build a DUI case. But I can regularly use the facts of an individual’s job and life and what was going on to give another reason for that. And that’s one of the keys to beating subjective clues.