TESTS OF SOBRIETY

Taranaki Daily News, 3 January 1935, Page 15

TESTS OF SOBRIETY

METHODS USED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

INQUIRY INTO THEIR LEGALITY. The present tests of sobriety used by the police in England are likely to be stopped shortly by order of the Home Office. An inquiry into their legality and propriety was lately being made. There is no statutory authority for the tests. A man arrested on a charge of being drunk in charge of a car is not bound to submit to them. But he always does. The tests vary according to the doctor who makes the examination. But there are some that are generally used. The defendant is asked to say “truly rural,” “constitutionally conditional,” “Sister Susie sewing shirts for soldiers,” and other equally difficult phrases. The motorist is made to stand erect, close his eyes, outstretch first his right and then his left arm, and bring his index finger smartly to the tip of his nose. He is ordered to walk, with eyes closed, across a room, toe to heel; then to stand on one leg and hold the other. Walking on a chalk line is another frequent test. A police surgeon in a Police Court in the metropolitan district recently stated that he applied the tests mentioned. When asked to do the finger-to-nose test in the box he failed. He admitted that normal, sober persons might have difficulty in passing his tests. Statistics showed that most of these cases occur between the hours of 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. Doctors have given it as their opinion that arrest and detention may be sufficient shock to produce the thickness of speech and nervous instability which make the passing of the tests altogether impossible.

Mr. Justice Swift has criticised the tests as “utterly unjustifiable.” A well-known K.C. declared that they were “like manufacturing evidence against a defendant—a thing repugnant to the elementary principles of British justice.”