I’m so happy you could join me today I want to talk a little bit about how to cross examine a police officer at an impaired driving trial. And our firm obviously does a lot of this type of work and there is a  particular methodology to show the an officer’s maybe not credible or reliable in their evidence. So impaired driving.First of all, you have to know how Impaired driving is proven. I do this with other videos but an impaired driving trial by itself is done by visual evidence of police officer, other witnesses. So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to weaken that evidence to show that the officers exaggerating or limit their evidence, just as an example, let’s say, the officer says, you know, they were weaving on the roadway. And there’s two officers who saw this so your your cross examined the first officer with a view to limiting the extent of weaving, and then you try and create inconsistencies between him or her and their partner to show that, hey, they can’t be that credible because they saw totally different scenes. We’re also trying to limit if there was slurring, they’ve never heard the person speak before you’re trying to characterize it as slight slurring if any and could have been due to nervousness shifting and unbalanced could be to nervousness.

At the police station we often we often hear officers testify about total unbalance and we confront him with a videotape that the guy who looks guy or woman looks perfectly balanced and you know it becomes a bit of a joke. And we’ve won many of these cases. But the bottom line is you have to cleverly step by step by step, try and weaken their evidence to show that their observations are minimal than they’re suggesting. Now, their observations already may be minimal and you might be able to win on their current observations and just say well, these could have different reasons like slight slurring or speech problem at the scene could be due to nervousness for example. Everyone’s nervous when they when they deal with the police.

And again, great use of the video at the police station. So there’s certain techniques I won’t get into it, but these cross examinations sometimes take an hour or two before you get what you need and want. And we’ve been very successful at limiting and weakening their evidence. So ultimately, we can argue with the judge, look, they’re not reliable, they weren’t accurate or maybe they weren’t credible and may not even be believable in some instances. Normally you’re arguing reliability though, and you’re just trying to limit it, and then argue that look, the client ultimately, the Crown has not proven the case beyond reasonable doubt. And a clever cross examiner on many impaired driving cases, is able to show and create reasonable doubt there’s no question about that. Thank you for joining me today.

By Published On: July 26, 2023Last Updated: November 16, 2023Categories: Impaired Driving/DUI, Video

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