You should NEVER take a roadside sobriety test given by a cop. It's just a sham for the cop to use to lie in court and commit perjury so the cop can convict you of DUI if don't fail the breath test. Original Article Divide is growing over roadside sobriety tests Standards have police, scientists, lawyers at odds Brigid Schulte Washington Post Jan. 8, 2006 12:00 AM Heels together. Toes out. Hands at your sides. Raise the leg of your choice in front of you, 6 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 . . . Some night on the side of the road, police lights flashing behind you, 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, that you may be too drunk to drive. The one-leg stand 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 a drunken-driving arrest. The NHTSA says officers using scores from all three tests will be 91 percent accurate in making an arrest. But in a case that made nationwide last year, an officer in Washington arrested attorney Debra Bolton after determining she failed all three. Bolton, who had had a glass of wine with dinner, challenged the charges. They were dropped. The NHTSA says the most accurate of the three is the horizontal gaze nystagmus test, or "jerking eyeball" test. An officer holds a 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. Origin of one-leg stand In 1975, the NHTSA requested proposals to develop a valid standardized test battery easy to use on the side of the road. So it called Marcelline Burns at the non-profit Southern California Research Institute in Los Angeles. Burns, 77, is a research psychologist who calls herself the "grandma guru" of the standardized field sobriety tests. She has had a long career developing them, testifying in courts nationwide as an expert witness and training police officers to use them correctly. Her group recruited 238 subjects (mostly men ages 22 to 29) from the local unemployment office, anyone over 21 with a driver's license and who admitted to imbibing a few. Subjects came to the lab at 8 a.m. and were "dosed" with either orange juice or a screwdriver. They were then led to small rooms where 10 California police officers waited. The officers administered six sobriety tests, then made a determination on the subjects' subject's blood-alcohol content and whether to make an arrest. Burns' final report, "Psychophysical Tests for DWI Arrest," was published in 1977. She wrote that while all six tests were sensitive to alcohol, meaning that drunken subjects tended to perform worse than sober ones, the best tests were the three 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." So hundreds of thousands of drivers have been arrested, no doubt many deservedly, on the basis of a 30-year-old study that, critics argue, has never been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, never tested on a large scale with a control group and has nothing to do with impairment from alcohol. Burns admits that the tests are designed only to gauge blood-alcohol content, not whether you're a menace. Out of balance? Burns insists that the average person should be able to balance on one leg for 30 seconds. But 40 percent of Americans will at some point experience a balance disorder. Dizziness and vertigo are the third-leading cause of doctor visits, behind lower back pain and headaches, according to the National Institutes of Health. Research indicates that the older you get, starting about 50, the less likely you will be able to stand on one leg for very long, and the more likely you will be to fall. It's anybody's guess as to the "normal" ability to balance. "The human equilibrium is a very complex system," said Richard Gans, founder and director of the American Institute of Balance in Florida. Ever had migraines or encephalitis, meningitis, shingles, chickenpox, ear infections, cardiovascular problems, numbness or tingling in the extremities? You may be unable to balance. Diabetes? You may not be able to feel your feet well enough to balance. Officers are taught to ask about medical problems. Attacking the research 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. Spurgeon Cole, a Georgia forensic scientist and consultant, has been her chief nemesis in court and expert witness for the defense for years. "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 would arrest nearly half the students. "And these people had absolutely zero to drink," Cole said in an interview. "These tests are absolutely worthless." The battle has raged in the courtroom. In Florida, the courts have decided that prosecutors cannot refer to them as "tests" that one can pass or fail. Rather, they are considered subjective "observations." In Ohio and other states, courts have held that unless the tests are administered in the standardized way, they are "inherently unreliable and thus inadmissible."