OK, let’s go out to the phone lines. We actually have a police officer, Dave from Sandy Springs. Welcome to the Adam Goldfein Show.
Dave: Thank you, thank you very much.
Goldfein: My pleasure.
Dave: [Unclear], from the Sandy Springs Police Department, how are you doing?
Head: Hey Dave, how are you doing?
Dave: Good, good. I’ve been listening to conversation here and I just thought for a quick second a perspective from a police officer is needed. I do agree with some of the things Mr. Head has said and, in fact, when I stop someone I do tell them when you do drinking and driving in Georgia, it’s not illegal. The two things I disagree with are the field sobriety evaluations. I probably, out of every one person that I arrest for DUI, I probably have ten to twelve people perform field sobriety evaluations. They’re very, in my opinion, very easy to do. It correlates with driving as far as it’s called “divided attention.” When you drive, you have to divide your attention. These field sobriety, they’re given a mental task and a physical task, such as to walk a line, turn around, and then come back, look for very minor things. In my opinion, they’re just very easy to do, especially if you’re not impaired. I don’t believe they are designed for failure. What you said about the standing orders that if you don’t do them, you’re going to be locked up, I would disagree with that.
When an officer makes the decision of whether or not they’re going to arrest somebody for DUI, the decision is based on the totality: the driving, physical manifestations, and if field sobriety evaluations are performed. If they’re not performed then the only thing the officer has to base his arrest decision on would be the driving and the physical manifestations. You don’t use the fact that you didn’t do the field sobriety evaluations against them because like you said earlier, they are voluntary.
Head: Well, that’s some good points you made and Dave, if everyone was as well trained as you and had been through all the training—you’ve been doing this close to 20 years. The problem I have, and you’ve seen it yourself…many officers don’t know how to give the evaluations. But I just had a state trooper—you know Ron Lloyd, he used to be with the state patrol—he said their standing orders are if you smell alcohol or you admit alcohol and you won’t take my field tests, you are 100 percent going to jail. Now that’s the state patrols rules, so maybe your department doesn’t mandate you to do it, but most of the police departments do require that the person be taken off the road just because you don’t want to let them go and maybe they’d cause an accident that the municipality could be sued for. So that’s the rule that I’m hearing all over the state from officers, and Ron just testified in a case in Cobb County for me about a week ago.
Goldfein: Hey Dave, while we have you on the line can I ask you a couple of quick questions?
Dave: Yes sir.
Goldfein: As far as the field sobriety tests, wouldn’t one of the challenges be that it’s subjective, it’s not necessarily like we’re looking at the .08 where it’s more of an objective reading and we can look at source code or the machine. This is the observations of the individual. Isn’t that possible that its one of the inconsistencies where you might be more proficient but other officers may be less so?
Dave: Yes, well you’re trained to look for certain things, so in a sense it would be the officer’s subjective view, but ideally what one officer…these are standardized and systematic. If you’re taught these in Key West, Florida or Anchorage, Alaska, the officer watching someone do field sobriety will see the same things that another officer should see.
Goldfein: Are they standardized around the country?
Dave: Yes, the training is from NHTSA, and it’s the same training anywhere in the United States and even, I believe, in England across the pond, they also do the same standard training. So they are systematic and standardized. Every officer, everywhere in the United States that have been to this training should be doing this the same exact way.
Head: Well that’s the problem. If they did do it that way; in fact, two ex-police officers who later got their PhD, they were the training officers for Texas, studied over 4,000 video tapes to see how many officers got all three of the field tests correctly—the standardized field tests. Ninety-eight percent did one or more of them incorrectly and they were following precisely by the book. They’re the instructors of the instructors. Dave, you know I had my instructor course, I know you’ve had your instructor course, haven’t you?
Dave: Yes sir.
Head: And very few people, though, go through all that training. But the attorneys at our office, and you know them, they’ve been through it. We make them go through the instructor course and the student course, so they’re as well trained as most police. And what we see in our office is better than 95 percent don’t do the field tests correctly. Now you do it right, Tony Corado, many of the people that you know and I know, Stanley Bryant from Roswell, a lot of them do it right. But there’s other people who just don’t do them correctly and that’s where I have a problem with people being arrested on evaluations that are so sensitive that you could end up going to jail for that.
Goldfein: Hey Dave, are there any police forces that you know that have quotas to make a certain number of arrests for DUI?
Dave: There’s not anymore. There was one department, I believe, that got in some hot water earlier in the year or last year that had one. But as far as I know, in our department, no there are quotas. It’s against the law and it looks real bad too. For the reason I do it, I don’t go out there because I want to lock someone up or because I want to make money for the city or whatever. I do it because I’ve had to go to someone’s house at 3 in the morning and say “you’re loved one is not coming home” because either they were killed in a DUI crash or killed somebody in a DUI crash. And if I can prevent that, then that’s my goal out there as an officer, and most of the officers I know, that’s their goal.
Goldfein: And I appreciate you sharing that. If you were giving advice out there to the folks in Georgia, and you had to say one thing from your 20 plus years of experience, what advice would you share?
Dave: I would say that DUI is a preventable crime. A little planning—a designated driver, have a one drink limit, plan to stay wherever you’re going for evening. It’s preventable. Just a little pre-planning, a little thinking before you get behind the wheel and you would never have to worry about this situation.
Head: Hey, I wouldn’t get any clients then, Dave, if everybody made those good decisions.
Goldfein: That’s actually my goal here—I would like you to have no clients. I’d like everyone to be safe.
Head: That would be fine; I know some other ways to make a living.
Goldfein: Hey Dave, thanks very much for taking some time out of the day and sharing your experience.
Head: Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you for having me.
Goldfein: I appreciate it. You know, it’s so interesting because you can see the tension, right? You know, and the advice where everybody is approaching it from the same side. So you have the police, obviously, that are sworn to protect and serve and they have that obligation to take it seriously. And at the same time, you can see examples that if it’s not done correctly, that the individual rights can be taken away from you. You know, when we were having lunch today, you were saying well imagine, hypothetically, that if they knocked on your door and arrested you for a crime you didn’t commit, what do you do if you get caught up in the system? And I think you do such a good service because that counter-balance, that yin and yang, is the only way we can have a free society, otherwise the pendulum could swing one way or the other.
Head: Well I’ve had police officers ask me after we’ve gone through a full trial and many times start off very distant and not wanting to talk or anything like that, they come up to me later and said that they had learned more in the two or three days we were at trial than they did in the police academy and they appreciated the fact that I didn’t go after them personally, I just went after them on violations of training. And they—usually they don’t get offended by that because if I point out what they didn’t do according to their own book, how could they argue with that? And so it’s never personal; in fact Dave, I’ve watched him on video hundreds of times. He is one of the most polite, cordial people to everybody he goes to—you won’t find an officer more cordial, but I’ve seen other people that look like a Sheltie dog on a little sheep. They’re running people and are a little bit overbearing. He’s not, he’s very polite.
Goldfein: Let’s go back to the phone lines if we can. Kristen from Roswell, you’re on the Adam Goldfein Show.
Kristen: Hi Adam. Hello Mr. Head. I’ve actually attended a seminar you gave in San Diego a couple of years ago, I just turned to the defense side and I am an ex-prosecutor from California and had a quick story to tell you and was wondering if you had a reaction to it.
Goldfein: Go ahead, try to get it in if you can cause we’re going to come up against a break.
Kristen: OK, when I was a prosecutor, I went upstairs to prosecute a DUI and after speaking with the defense attorney and reviewing the file for the third time, I realized that I actually had no case. And, you know, that was my job—if I have a case, I prosecute. I dismissed the charges. Unbeknownst to me, a representative of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers was in the audience and before I could get back upstairs to my office, had already complained to my supervisor. My supervisor had to review the file, talk to the police officer, and after about two weeks decided, with me, that there was nothing to proceed on and we got a nasty letter from MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Drivers—and I was just wondering if Mr. Head had felt their presence here in Georgia.
Goldfein: I appreciate the call, Kristen.
Head: Absolutely. I had a case where I worked it out with the DA of a particular county—a very tough case, we worked it out, had the people who were involved in a car wreck on board to give us this work out and MADD interfered with that, stopped the deal from going. It took us another four months to get the same deal through and they basically injected themselves in a case where the people involved in the crash were on board, they knew the whole situation instead of part of the situation, so sometimes MADD can take a hard-line approach when all other indications are this case should be resolved in a certain way.
Goldfein: Let me ask you a quick question before we go back to the phone lines or we start wrapping up here. If somebody’s listening to the show and they want to hire or retain your firm, or a partner, or a lawyer in your firm, or possibly you, is that an option for folks that are listening?
Head: Sure, we always review cases for free, because we think it’s like going to a doctor and you have a serious medical condition—you might not like the first doctor you go to or you might now like his or her opinion of what’s going to happen to you, say its cancer surgery. So we tell people to come in, we give you a free appointment, we sit down with you for about an hour, an hour and a half, and we give you our perspective on what could be done. If you don’t like it, you can always walk away.
Goldfein: And what’s your website, your phone number, if someone wanted to reach out to you?
Head: Well Georgia Criminal Defense has more information, including the phone number…
Goldfein: So it’s GeorgiaCriminalDefense.com. Ok, that’s pretty easy to remember.
Head: Well it’s pretty memorable, since that’s what people are charged with, this crime, so.
Goldfein: Yeah, I mean when you have that facing you, I just can’t imagine—your entire world is just turned upside down.
Head: Yeah, it stops everything. People can’t sleep, they get into arguments, they lose weight most of the time. Many people—I’ve had 13 suicides before the case ever came to court, just from the stress of worrying about the case.
Goldfein: How many cases have you had, personally?
Head: About 4600 in 35 years, personally, but our firm has handled well over 12,000.
Goldfein: Alright, so listen, let’s start going down some of the consequences. You know, I got caught up in the moment. If we’re looking at court-related consequences, you’ve already told us that the conviction is never, never removed from your record. It follows you to the grave.
Head: To the grave.
Goldfein: OK, what would be some of the other top consequences that if you’re counseling someone, you say “OK, here is the down and dirty, have to know this”? What would it be?
Head: Well for people with a very first offense, I tell them don’t even put that on your record because one offense can, for example, bar you from going into Canada, say if you wanted to go there for personal or business reasons as a federal crime under federal Canadian law to go there. In fact, if you’re even charged with a DUI, you can’t go to Canada, so you need to make sure that you don’t do that. But the other thing—your job, that’s where you’re really going to be affected. This job or a future job, you may not be able to work.
Goldfein: Hold on—when we get back, I know you have a whole list here. We’ll try to cover the top ten consequences of a DUI conviction in Georgia. You’re listening to the Adam Goldfein Show on AM 750 now 95.5 FM, News Talk, WSB.
Commercial Break
Goldfein: Welcome back to the show, I’m Adam Goldfein. Before I forget, I want to make sure to thank you.
Head: Glad to be here.
Goldfein: It has been a pleasure, an honor to have you spend the time, and I hope you back and spend more time with us.
Head: I will be glad to.
Goldfein: Alright, so let me ask you, before we do the consequences, the things that keep you awake at night. You’ve been doing this 35 years, you’ve had 4600 cases, your firm is the preeminent firm in the field. But the thing I’ve gotten to know about you is that you are one of most compassionate individuals I’ve ever met, and you wear it—you wear your heart on your sleeve. So I’ve just got to imagine that this takes a tremendous toll.
Head: It does, because if you take it seriously, and I tell people this quite often, especially when it’s parents with a young person, I have teenage daughters and I tell them flat out that I will do everything for your child I would do my child. And it’s that kind of responsibility that takes a toll on you. It’s hard to sleep many nights, especially if you’re in a trial. If it weren’t for Ambien, I wouldn’t sleep at all. You just can’t imagine the stress that’s there because it’s so much responsibility. But even without a trial, some days are just very hectic and it’s grueling on anybody that does this all the time.
Goldfein: You know, we had played the audio of that 911 call earlier in the show and that was a case that you were called in after the individual had already been convicted and tried to help.
Head: No, he had actually been represented, it was just prior to trial, nearly two years and the other attorney—my client was worried, because it looked like it was going to be a plea for much longer than the judge actually gave him at the trial, by the way, and he hired me—his boss hired me, he worked for a car dealer who wrote the check, because my client didn’t have the money. And I had to do things at three or four times the normal pace to get ready for that case.
Goldfein: So what doesn’t somebody do in the event that they don’t have money and they’re pulled over and arrested for a DUI? What do they do?
Head: Well, public defenders out there are excellent and I do training for public defenders and I help pay their way to go because the state has quit paying for public defender training, unfortunately. And the course in San Diego was a blood and urine course, very sophisticated.
Goldfein: We talked about that it never leaves you, you can’t go to Canada, you got two or three quick consequences?
Head: On a second lifetime DUI under what’s called InterstateCompact.org—that’s a federal regulation—you end up being treated like a child molester. You can’t leave the state, you can’t travel, it’s very serious.
Goldfein: You’re listening to the Adam Goldfein Show on AM 750 now 95.5 FM, News Talk, WSB.
