Diane Pipkins

When a law enforcement officer stops a presumed drunk driver they have essentially three tools at their disposal to estimate an individual’s degree of impairment from alcohol. Number one is of course visual. Number two is the officer’s sense of smell and number three, in the field, are breath tests . It is incumbent on the officer to make some kind of quantitative decision of the amount of alcohol disability at the time of the stop. All the elements mentioned above do not matter to the officer. All he or she wants to do is to produce a clear snapshot in time of the degree of impairment at the time of the stop.