POLICE REPORTS
In almost every Oakland County drunk driving case, there will be one or more police reports created by the cops who conducted the DUI investigation. Knowing and understanding what these mean and how they can be attacked is a vital part of your drunk driving defense.
WHAT ISN’T IN THE REPORT IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
A long time ago a fellow drunk driver defense attorney told me that the most important part of looking at a police report is determining what is not in the report. I took that advice to heart and have made it a foundational part of any police officer cross examination that I perform on a cop. For instance, a drunk driving police report may say that the accused had trouble balancing when they performed a field sobriety test. However, the rest of the report was silent on whether the accused had poor balance during the entire stop. This gives your DUI Lawyer a great chance to show the jury that for the vast majority of the stop, the accused was able to balance just fine. This can be applied for nearly every fact in the police report, such as you didn’t fumble for your wallet, didn’t fall when getting out of the car, etc…. Ultimately, this strategy of cross-examination will show the jury a few extremely important things: that the officer did not put into their report evidence of the defendant’s innocence; that there is much more evidence of innocence; and that the officer was not being fully honest when constructing their police report. Here is an example of cross-examining the officer of things not in the report:
MAKING THE OFFICER CHANGE THEIR REPORT ON THE STAND
I have honed a technique during cross-examination in drunk driving cases of forcing the officer to admit that their police report was not accurate. Doing this before a jury makes a lasting impact when you get the officer to admit that they screwed up and that they did not properly do their job. The trick is to begin your cross-examination by discussing with the officer their training and specifically, their training in drafting police reports. They will have to admit that they have been trained to write down all relevant information in their police report. Then, you ask them whether they would like to add anything to the report. They will always say no because if they said yes, then they are admitting the report is not accurate. Then you hammer the inaccuracies in the report, such as the inability of the officer to properly document or perform field sobriety tests. And finally, when you show them that they incorrectly wrote the report, then you hand them the report and ask them whether they would like to change it. Of course they will say yes!!!! Here is an example of this:
INNACURACIES IN THE REPORT
When viewing a drunk driving police report, you have to look for the inaccuracies between the police report and the other evidence that you have. For instance, many police reports will say that the defendant was slurring his speech. Yet, when the video tape of the stop is viewed, the defendant can be heard clearly speaking to the officer without any slurring of speech. This inaccuracy has to be used to show not only that the defendant was not intoxicated, but as important, that the officer was exaggerating their report as to the slurring of the speech. Inaccuracies exist in every police report. The reason for this is that in most cases, people hire bad lawyers who push pleas on winnable cases, so the cops never get cross-examined on their reports. Further, cops are trained to create a case against you within their report, so you will always see things like “the suspect had a strong odor of alcohol,” yet you only blow a 0.08 on the Datamaster. I have never seen, in the context of a drunk driving police report, an officer say the suspect had a weak odor of intoxicants. So know your report, read it over, look for what isn’t in the report, what is inaccurate about the report, and then attack that cop.
