When you are stopped and arrested for a DUI, do not consent to a search of your motor vehicle. There is new precedence that determined that the search of a motor vehicle incident to an arrest during an alcohol DUI arrest is unlawful. For instance, if you are arrested on a DUI and put in a police vehicle and they subsequently found marijuana in your car, there would be a suppression issue in your case. As a Tacoma, WA based DUI lawyer, Cristine Beckwith has been successful at suppressing evidence that is subject to an unlawful DUI search.
Category: DUI Topics
Your DUI breath test may be over the legal limit on the breath ticket you receive from law enforcement, but may in fact be below the legal limit. Washington State is not providing confidence intervals on breath tests and criminal defense attorney’s such as Cristine Beckwith have been successfully arguing in some jurisdictions that without this evidence, DUI breath test results should not be admissible in court. Scientific data is generally accepted when the rate of uncertainty is presented with the data. Prosecutors are presenting this evidence without providing the information regarding the uncertainty data for those tests. Without this evidence, some courts are finding that the breath tests as submitted are not supported by generally accepted standards in the scientific community and as a result are suppressing some breath tests. Cristine Beckwith is a Tacoma DUI attorney with a proven track record on DUI defense.
Under Washington State DUI laws, field sobriety tests are optional. If you pass the field sobriety tests with a perfect score and the law enforcement officer notices no other signs of intoxication, there may be no DUI arrest. However, any score less than a perfect score will often result in a DUI arrest. A study done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration examining the accuracy of the One Leg Stand DUI test showed a 35% failure rate in identifying a person with a .10% or lower blood alcohol concentration. There are many other good reasons to decline to submit to an optional field sobriety test. If you are under investigation of DUI, you should invoke your right to silence and ask to speak to a DUI attorney. Cristine Beckwith is an experienced Tacoma DUI lawyer who has successfully challenged the results of field sobriety tests in court.