FSA Position Statements

1. Driving while under the influence is a serious societal problem and warrants application of the best tests and procedures available in a responsible, unbiased, professional manner.
2. Current sobriety tests and behavioral indices have little scientific support and show wide variation among individuals (Rubenzer, 2007).
3. While enforcement of DWI/DUI laws require a number of value judgments (e.g., the relative cost of failing to arrest a drunk driver vs. falsely arresting one that is not), standard tools of scientific analysis bring greater objectivity and fairness to the process.
4. Sobriety tests that are used to prove impairment in court should be validated by demonstrating that they correlate highly with reliable and valid measures of mental, behavioral, or driving impairment.
5. Future sobriety test validity studies should be done in a “blind” manner so that other clues of intoxication (e.g., red eyes, slurred speech) do not affect test scoring.
6. Future studies on sobriety tests which use a dichotomous criterion (e.g., above or below a specific BAC) should routinely report full diagnostic statistics. In addition to sensitivity and specificity, this specifically includes positive and negative predictive power at different base rates (percentage of intoxicated subjects in the sample).
7. Available data suggest that the current Standardized Field Sobriety Tests (SFSTs) have limited inter-rater and test-retest reliability, and are subject to substantial false positive rates when BAC is the criterion (Rubenzer, 2007).
8. NHTSA training materials should be modified to include cautions about the effect of age and physical (e.g., medical) conditions on the SFSTs, including HGN. Misleading or incorrect information should be corrected and communicated to officers trained under previous programs.
9. Testimony about sobriety tests should rely on the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and experts should be able to cite papers which support their position. They should also qualify their opinions based on limitations of the studies relied up on and contrary findings.
10. The adequacy of a sobriety test depends on the purpose for which it is used. The SFSTs, properly administered to a young, healthy, physically fit subject, are probably adequate to meet the relaxed standards pertaining to probable cause. However, they do not currently meet Frye or Daubert criteria for scientific evidence (Rubenzer, 2007).

More complete recommendations for further research on the SFSTs are given in Rubenzer, S. J. (2007). The Standardized Field Sobriety Tests: A Review of Scientific and Legal Issues. Law and Human Behavior, DOI: 10.1007/s10979-007-9111- y, which is included in the FSA training program.