If the police pull you over and ask you to do field sobriety tests or even blow into a portable breath test to see if you’re intoxicated, it may be worth thinking about the reason that they stopped you initially. The officer couldn’t have known that you were intoxicated simply by looking at your vehicle. They needed some reason to pull you over, and they have to do this legally.
If the officer neglects to make a legal stop, even if it does turn out that you were impaired or that your BAC was over the legal limit, you may be able to use this as a defense against your charges. You could claim that you never should have been arrested because you were illegally stopped initially, making everything that happened after that stop also illegal. Your rights were violated because the police are not allowed to just conduct random traffic stops.
So why can they stop you?
One thing to understand is that there are many different reasons police can pull your car over. It could be as simple as noticing that your taillight is out or that you’re going a few miles an hour over the speed limit. People are often stopped for rolling through stop signs. Anything that violates the vehicle code in the state is enough for an official traffic stop. From there, the police can determine if they think that you are intoxicated or not.
That said, there are certainly cases where the police essentially make random stops or even stereotype people and pull them over when they haven’t done anything wrong. If something like this has happened to you, it’s critical that you understand your legal rights.