The Officer Who Had a Small Opinion of Me

My client gets arrested for drunk driving. Now, of course, the Department of Motor Vehicles wants to suspend his license. Today is his telephone hearing. The DMV calls the CHP officer to testify, and I cross-examine him.

The officer thinks highly of himself, or he thinks little of of me, because he starts out giving smart-guy answers. Fine. I love being underestimated. Especially during cross-examination.

A mistake in his report opens the way for some questions: the times of the preliminary-alcohol-screening-device tests in the DMV report don’t mesh with the time of arrest. It’s a small mistake; it's not a big deal, if only the officer just admits that he made a mistake. But no. The officer wants to be clever. He says the times are off because he used the dispatch center’s time for the time of arrest, but his wristwatch for the PAS-test times.

So I ask him, if that is the case, why the PAS-test times in his DMV report don’t match the PAS-test times in the arrest report? (The times in the arrest report mesh perfectly with the time of arrest.)  He can’t explain. He should have admitted from the start that he made a careless mistake.  But he didn’t. And he should have known his own reports better than I did.

When the officer gets frustrated, he pretends not to know the context of the question. If I ask about field sobriety tests, he pretends not to understand the question, unless I put the entire context into the question itself. Fine. That might confuse and frustrate a new lawyer, but this is almost my fourth decade of cross-examining witnesses. If he wants the whole context in each question, I am happy to meet his needs. ("Officer, about the second field sobriety test that you gave to my client, next to his car, on the night of his arrest, when you explained the field sobriety test, did you . . .?")

And the officer uses that most common tactic of evasion: if he thinks an answer will help my client, he answers the question he wants to answer, not the question I ask. And when he does that, I ask the question again, word-for-word. The third time I do that, he says, "Counsel, I answered that question three times. I said . . .." And I reply, forcefully, "Officer, you have not answered that question once." Because he hasn’t. I don't let go until I get a simple, truthful answer.

I won't know the result of the hearing for a few days.  But I know three things. First, I had a good time.  Second, my client was very pleased with the aggressive questioning of the officer.  Third, when the officer goes on duty tonight, he's going to give some driver a very hard time.