An exclusive Channel 2 Action News Investigation finds hundreds of Georgians arrested for DUI in 2025 later were proven to be sober by GBI blood tests.
In suspected DUI cases, the GBI tests samples for drugs only if they are found to be under the legal limit for alcohol.
Through an open records request, Channel 2 Action News Consumer Investigator Justin Gray obtained records showing that 701 people tested by the GBI in 2025 had no illegal or prescription drugs found in their system during toxicology screenings.
Smyrna resident Lenny Daniel is one of those.
“It’s a shame to be arresting innocent people like that who did nothing wrong,” Daniel said after Gray showed him the open records data.
Channel 2 Action News Investigates first introduced you to Daniel in an October 2025 story.
The 65-year-old widower was arrested and charged with DUI by Kennesaw police even after blowing a .000 on the breathalyzer after a traffic stop.
The arresting officer said he suspected Daniel was under the influence of drugs based on the result of a field sobriety test.
In a November story, we showed how 19-year-old college student McClain Fineran was also arrested for DUI based on a field sobriety test.
After the kicker on the Shorter University football team blew .000 on a breathalyzer, Rome police suspected marijuana impairment and charged him with DUI after a fender bender in a college parking lot. Fineran had called police to the scene himself to report that he had hit a parked car.
“I don’t drink, never have. Haven’t done drugs, never had. It’s just not what I do. And he said well I have the suspicion that you have,” Fineran told Gray in November.
Both men, Fineran and Daniel spent the night in jail and were formally charged with DUI. In both cases, GBI blood tests eventually came back clean for drugs and alcohol.
Daniel says it is disturbing to see the number of other Georgians that had the same thing happen.
“Wow that’s rough. It just seems like something needs to change there. There’s a problem with that being the case. That’s a huge number,” Daniel said.
More than 10% of the 6,875 blood samples GBI tested in 2025 came back “not detected” for all forms of prescription and illegal drugs.
And critics say it is tied to field sobriety tests created to catch drunk drivers that were not designed to spot drug impairment.
As much as the training materials we reviewed present this as “scientifically validated,” critics say it is not.
“I think that the hardest thing for any human is to go back and sit there and say, maybe I shouldn’t have arrested that person,” Joshua Ott told Gray last fall.
Ott was a Roswell Police Officer for more than a decade and now is a DUI expert witness.
Ott was also an instructor for both ARIDE and the even more advanced Drug Recognition Expert program.
Ott now believes there is no evidence that the roadside tests he taught are accurate for drugs.
“We are using supposedly scientific evidence that has very high false positive rates,” said Ott.
Why did Ott change his mind?
Data from studies including a 2023 University of California, San Diego study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at field sobriety tests and marijuana.
“Basically, the officers could have administered al these tests or flipped a quarter and they would come out with the same statistical reliability of the test,” said Ott.
The study found after giving the roadside field sobriety test officers classified 49% of the placebo group – the sober group – impaired.
GBI tells us the numbers from our open records request should be considered an “estimate” because “this data was generated through several queries of a database and compiled within a separate spreadsheet. It should be considered as an estimate, since all cases have not been individually evaluated.”
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