Washington State Patrol Tweets DUIs - Is That Okay?

Recently the Washington State Patrol decided to live tweet a night with the DUI task force emphasis patrol. I didn't follow along that night but have had a chance to go back and see what was going on, and I was a little surprised to see it. It got me to thinking, is it okay to live tweet this stuff? Is that responsible of the Washington State Patrol?

I think you might assume that I'm a bit biased in my opinion about this behavior - I am, after all, a DUI lawyer. And you would be right. But you might be surprised why. It's not necessarily because people's arrests are being tweeted out there for all to see - an arrest, after all, is public information. If you wanted to you could go down to your local state patrol and find out who was arrested the night before.

I actually love the twitter feed. You can find it here - @wspd1pio. It gives you a great glimpse into the mind of a State Trooper. It shows you why you should never take field sobriety tests if asked to do so. The deck is stacked against you before they even make contact with you.

Here are just a couple of examples of tweets from that night:

There's 3 collisions in Thurston right now. Usually these are the DUI's that don't quite make it home.

Stop #12!! Lane travel violation this time. So far, anyway

Trooper Gill's running field sobriety tests on stop #12.

Yay! Stop #12 was not an impaired driver!

We've had 11 stops tonight, 2 of them DUI's. Wonder how the others are doing?? (Not as good as us!! Muahaha!)

Here's what I find interesting about these tweets. Let's talk about the first one first. What we've got here is a report of an accident (three actually). There's no information about the accident other than there's a collision. Before the Trooper even gets there he's thinking about arresting someone for DUI. I understand he probably can't help this, but that promotes the idea that you have no chance of escaping if the Trooper gets there and you have any odor of alcohol on your breath.

As with the others, what disappoints me is that it seems like every person that is stopped ends up going through the field sobriety tests. For stop number 12, we see a lane violation. Next thing we know, the person is going through field sobriety tests - then they are let go. I don't know all the facts about this stop, but I'm going to guess this Trooper is administering field tests on almost everyone he stops since he's part of the DUI emphasis patrol.

Why is this a problem, you might be asking? It's called a pretextual stop. It's stopping someone for one thing (a minor traffic violation) when really looking for something else based on innocuous circumstances (in this case there may have been previous DUI arrests in this location, and it's late at night). The problem with this is that in Washington State pretextual stops are illegal!

I hope the troopers keep on tweeting. I hope anyone stopped and arrested for DUI that night (November 25-26) has a DUI attorney that somehow stumbles upon this information (maybe they'll read my blog). It opens up at least the argument that the stop was illegal. And if the stop was illegal, everything after that is illegally seized evidence, and can't be used in a trial.

Stay safe during the holidays. Don't drive drunk. Use your turn signals. Say no to field sobriety tests. Say no to the portable breath test. If you are arrested demand to speak to a DUI attorney before doing anything else. Happy holidays!