Alcohol field tests under fire

Taking the tests

By BRIGID SCHULTE
THE WASHINGTON POST

Stand up! Heels together. Toes out. Hands at your sides. Raise the leg of your choice in front of you, six inches off the ground, leg straight, toe pointed. Keep your eyes on your raised toe and begin counting aloud from 1,001 until I say stop.
One thousand one. One thousand two…

Some dark night on the side of the road, police lights flashing in your peripheral vision, your freedom may depend on how well you do this.

Did you sway? Raise your arms for balance? Hop, or put your foot down? If you did any two, an officer will conclude with 65 percent accuracy, as stipulated in the prevailing science of inebriation diagnostics, that you may be too drunk to drive.

Did you bend your leg? Stare straight ahead instead of at your foot? Begin too soon? Officers are taught that drunken people don't follow directions well.

This is the one-leg stand. It is one of the three scientifically researched standardized field sobriety tests, blessed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that officers call "the holy grail" and give on the roadside to help them decide whether to make an arrest.

The NHTSA says officers using scores from all three tests will be 91 percent accurate in making an arrest.

The NHTSA says the most accurate of the three is the "jerking eyeball" test. An officer holds a penlight or small flashlight before you and asks you to track it visually from side to side. If you've drunk too much, your eyeballs will begin shaking about 45 degrees from center.

The two other tests, the one-leg stand and the walk and turn (nine steps forward and back on a straight line), are "divided attention" tests that require both mental concentration and physical coordination. The one-leg stand has its skeptics and its court challenges, but the test is "easily performed by most unimpaired people," the NHTSA says.

Before the one-leg stand, police officers were on their own.

Some threw coins on the ground and ordered that only nickels or quarters be picked up. They would have a driver lean back and touch one finger to his nose. Recite the alphabet without singing. Count backward from 100 by threes. Texas Rangers just chatted for a bit before making a judgment call.

Chuck Hayes, a state trooper for 30 years in Oregon, remembers fellow officers putting a flashlight on the ground and telling drivers to run around it five times.

"How are you going to tell if a person is impaired that way?" asked Hayes, now a field sobriety test trainer. "There was just some weird, weird stuff."

So, in 1975, the NHTSA re-quested proposals to develop a valid standardized test.

Marcelline Burns and her colleagues at the nonprofit Southern California Research Institute in Los Angeles got the job.

Her group recruited 238 subjects from the local unemployment office — anyone over 21 with a driver's license and who admitted to imbibing a few — and paid them $3 a day. Subjects came to the lab and were "dosed" with either a placebo of orange juice or a screwdriver (orange juice with vodka). They were then led to small rooms where 10 police officers waited. The officers gave six different sobriety tests, then decided whether they would make an arrest.

Burns' final report was published in 1977. She recommended the three tests in use today.

Burns did not test the drunken subjects when sober to see how well they could balance on one leg.

"The evidence that it's an easy task comes from the placebo people," she said. "They could do it fine."

Here's a bar chart from her study: Most of them were men, ages 22 to 29. One could argue the placebo people didn't look much like America.

So hundreds of thousands of drivers have been arrested — no doubt many deservedly so — on the basis of a 30-year-old study that, critics argue, has never been published in a scientific journal, never tested on a large scale with a control group and, perhaps more astonishing, has nothing to do with impairment. Burns admits upfront that the tests are designed only to gauge drunkenness, not whether you're a menace on the road.

Burns insists that the average person should be able to balance on one leg for 30 seconds. She can. She practices the one-leg stand every few weeks.

But consider how imbalanced we are. Forty percent of people in the United States will at some point in their lifetime experience a balance disorder, and dizziness and vertigo are the third leading cause of doctor visits, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Ever had encephalitis, meningitis, shingles, chickenpox, ear infections, cardiovascular problems, numbness or tingling in the extremities or migraines? You may be unable to balance.

Hayes, the trainer, said officers are taught to ask about injuries or medical problems. "A lot of the American public just has a tough time with balance, period," he said. "If an officer sees that, and if there weren't any clues on the other two tests, that's a no-brainer: This person is not impaired."

But how many other officers would make the same call?

Some forensic psychologists and a slew of DUI defense attorneys have been assiduously picking apart Burns' research on the standardized field sobriety tests for years. She is unmoved.

"These defense attorneys write all this stuff, but never once do they suggest an optional test. What do they want the officer to do? Toss a coin?" she asked.

Not at all, says Spurgeon Cole, a Georgia forensic scientist and consultant who has been her chief nemesis in court. Maybe videotapes in patrol cars, he argues, would help remove some of the subjectivity.

"How does age or gender affect performance? How does fatigue or practice affect performance?" he has written.

Cole administered the tests to 21 of his students at Clemson University in South Carolina — none of whom had had a drop of alcohol — and showed the videotape of their performance to a group of officers, who reported they'd arrest nearly half the students.

So what's a police officer to do? Scientists are developing roadside saliva tests to measure blood alcohol, but that's years away. A Texas A&M researcher has come up with a video game-like machine to test memory and physical dexterity and record mistakes, timing and accuracy. A computer then calculates your intoxication level.

But previous studies have found that about 20 percent of drivers actually improve with alcohol. "I guess it calms them down," Cole said.

That leaves us right back where we started, with the one-leg stand.

One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand three…