Driving Under The Influence In Arizona

After the FST portion, the subject is often placed under arrest. The officer will handcuff your hands behind your back. Part of the reason for that is for officer safety, but the other reason is to ensure that the subject does not place anything in his/her mouth. Placing foreign objects into the mouth (or vomiting or regurgitating) prior to the breath test will render said breath test unreliable. The well-trained officer will seek to ensure that nothing is in the subject’s mouth and that the subject does not vomit.

The person is then either taken to the precinct or to a mobile DUI van for the breath test (note: there is significant momentum among Arizona law enforcement agencies to go to blood testing). Either way, the testing will generally not be done roadside.

Once at the DUI processing site, the officer will ask you some questions. If the right to remain silent or the right to speak to an attorney is invoked, then all questioning must cease. In this phase, if no such right is invoked, then the officer has a list of pre-printed questions that he will ask. Your answers are then written down or typed (verbatim where possible). A particularly tricky question that the officer asks is “On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being completely sober and 10 completely drunk, how would you rate yourself at the time of driving?” Since Arizona law does not require you to be drunk to be cited for DUI, only impaired to the slightest degree, any answer that is not 0 will be considered an admission of impairment later at a DUI trial. The officer is only seeking to gather evidence against you at this point. No answer that you give will get you out of the DUI arrest.