DUI Lawyer In Georgia

Reader’s Question:

A friend of mine was charged with DUI in West Dougherty, Georgia and according to the police report, he was strongly slurring his speech that’s why he was arrested for drunk driving. Is having a slurred speech really an indicator of intoxication?

Alisa

West Dougherty, GA

The very sound answer to this is yes and no. Yes in the very limited sense that intoxication is indeed a common cause of having a slurred speech. It is more likely that if a person has been drinking heavily, it will affect his or her speaking fluency. Also, yes if it goes the other way that if a person is strongly slurring his or her speech and in the absence of a speech impediment or neurological disorder, that person has probably been drinking. So if your friend doesn’t have any speech defect or neurological disorder, he was probably intoxicated when he was caught drunk driving in West Dougherty, Georgia.

But this doesn’t mean that it’s possible to judge, with a high degree of reliability, that a person is above the legal limit simply based on listening to them talk. Remember that drinking and driving is actually not against the law. It would be against the law if the person is operating a vehicle with a certain blood alcohol content or while being significantly impaired. But let’s put the question in a different way. Can a person certainly distinguish between a person who is too drunk to drive versus someone who consumed alcohol but can nonetheless drive legally-all based on how they talk? After all, that is what police officers undoubtedly claim to do when they put “slurred speech” on the police report. To answer that question, it would be a decidedly “no.” It may be true that both non-experts and experts can usually tell a person who has been drinking heavily from someone who hasn’t, but they cannot consistently determine the relative amount of alcohol a person has consumed.

Tags: drunk driving laws, DUI, DUI advice, DUI arrest, DUI lawyer