On August 28th, 2015 Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Dennis Langer held in a recent decision that although the therein defendant to a felony DUI case drove his vehicle through the side of a hotel room wall and stayed the night before in a room filled with empty beer bottles, other factors illustrated at the suppression hearing weighed in favor of a finding that no reasonable articulable suspicion existed for police to detain the defendant for purposes of imposing field sobriety testing upon him. Judge Langer also found that no probable cause existed to support the defendant’s arrest. Ultimately, then, the trial court suppressed the field sobriety testing that was performed upon the defendant. The decision stands for the proposition that an automobile accident alone, without further indicia of impaired driving, cannot give officers the right to detain the driver for field sobriety testing.
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