Tiffany Haddish’s legal team just got a major win when a judge threw out key evidence from her Georgia DUI case.
Tiffany Haddish just caught a legal break in her Georgia DUI case that could shift the entire trajectory of her defense.
A Fayette County judge ruled Wednesday that one of the field sobriety tests used against her can’t be presented at trial, along with any statements she made to police during the initial stop.
The decision marks a significant win for her legal team as they continue fighting to get the four-year-old misdemeanor case dismissed entirely.
The judge found that the officer who arrested Haddish botched the Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus test, commonly known as the HGN test, which requires a suspect to follow an object with their eyes while an officer watches for involuntary eye movements.
Here’s where it gets interesting: Haddish told the officer she had a lazy eye, but he never asked follow-up questions about it and administered the test anyway without adjusting for that condition.
The court determined the test wasn’t applied reliably, so the results are inadmissible.
Additionally, the judge ruled that Haddish wasn’t read her Miranda rights before the officer began questioning her about the smell of marijuana in her vehicle.
The court found that when the officer told her they needed to address something and mentioned detecting weed, that constituted the start of an interrogation requiring the standard rights warning.
Without that warning, her statements from that moment can’t be used against her either.
The victory isn’t total, though. Prosecutors can still rely on evidence from two other field sobriety tests that were administered during the arrest.
Her attorneys, Marissa Goldberg and Drew Findling, have been aggressive in their defense strategy, recently filing a motion to dismiss the entire case for speedy-trial violations.
They argue that four years of delays have violated her constitutional rights and damaged her career, especially since, according to TMZ, no one was injured or killed in the incident.
This case stems from Haddish’s January 2022 arrest in Peachtree City, Georgia, when she was found asleep behind the wheel.
She faced a second DUI arrest in November 2023 in Beverly Hills after being found sleeping in her car on Beverly Drive.
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