DUI Court Outcomes

Published
by
admin
on August 20, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Well it’s been months since I posted here, but the DUI court process is a long and tedious one and I wanted to make sure I had everything wrapped up before I started writing about it. At any rate, let me bring you up to date on what’s happened since my last post in March. As I mentioned at that point, the State had failed to produce its evidence against me in time for my scheduled court date and so the initial hearing was moved back by 1 month while we waited. In the meantime I got to continue driving on my temporary (30 day pink slip) license, since the DMV hearing was also rescheduled, pending the state’s evidence.

I’ll digress for a moment here to explain how the DMV’s involvement in a DUI case works, at least in California, and at least as far as I understand it, because at this point I’m pretty sure that most of the people *at* the DMV don’t really understand it. So basically, when you’re cited for DUI, the police will take your driver’s license away and give you a temporary (30-day) pink slip that allows you to drive wherever and whenever you want during that period. If you take no further action during the first 10 days after being cited, then this license will automatically expire 30 days after your arrest and your right to drive will be suspended until you are eligible to apply for re-instatement from the DMV. If you *do* contact the DMV during the first 10 days after your arrest, you can request a hearing to review the facts of your case and appeal the suspension. So if for instance, your Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) turns out to be something within the legal limits, then you can present this info to the DMV and they can choose to overturn the suspension. This happens independantly of the court proceedings and depending on the county and judge and other factors, the court may choose to levy additional suspensions in addition to fines, community service and etc. Still though, it’s a good idea to at least ask for the hearing from the DMV I think, since you’ll be able to keep pushing the hearing date back and hold on to your temporary license until the state finally gets around to providing you or your attorney with the evidence they have against you.

Now, in my case, the state did finally send the information on my BAC to my attorney after a month or so, and based on the results I chose to withdraw my request for a DMV hearing as it was pretty obvious that my suspension wasn’t going to be overturned. My BAC was 0.12 which is 0.04 above the legal limit of 0.08 (although I will point out that the legal limit used to be 0.1 not so long ago and was actually 0.15 when BAC tests were first introduced!)

So once we got these results a number of things (finally) happened. First, as I mentioned, I withdrew my request for a DMV hearing, which meant that my license was immediately suspended and I started taking public transit to work. Next, my attorney was able to set a court date for the disposition of my case, although this date was yet another month and a half in the future. The frustrating part about this was that after 30 days of license suspension, registering for a “alcohol education” class and filing an SR-22 document (more on this later) with the DMV, I’d be eligible to apply for a “restricted” license, which would allow me to drive back and forth to work (and to the alcohol class). But the normal way this process works is that you have your court date, the court refers you to the alcohol class and then you apply for the restricted license. But since my court hearing was more than a month after my license suspension started, I decided to try to speed up this process somewhat. After talking to the DMV on the phone I went ahead and got my insurance company to file an SR-22 on my behalf and I also started looking into registering for an alcohol education class. Initially I got a bit of a runaround from these guys (“What?! You don’t have your court paperwork? Then we can’t do anything for you!”) but I was persistent and they finally agreed to let me register early. My argument was basically one of, “Look… I don’t know *exactly* what’s going to happen in court, but I’m pretty sure that taking this class is going to be one of the requirements.” So now that this class and my SR-22 were on file with the state I walked into the local DMV office one morning and walked out with my restricted license, before I had even been to court! I’m not sure if this was 100% legal, but if anybody was in a position to tell me otherwise it was the DMV and they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

The next thing to happen, of course, was my court date. Having taken the day off from work and put on my best suit, I took the bus down to the courthouse to meet my attorney. While I was waiting for my case to come up, I noticed a few things about the other people in DUI court that day. First of all, I was a little bit over-dressed, as most of the other defendants seemed to be wearing typical Oakland ensembles of hoodies, football jerseys, t-shirts & jeans. There’s no harm in standing out for looking too professional though, so this didn’t really bother me a whole lot. What *was* somewhat annoying was watching the 3 or 4 people who went in front of the judge ahead of me who were represented by the public defender or by themselves, and who ended up getting exactly the same sentence as I did!

So, the standard sentence for a first time DUI offender (in Alameda county anyway) appears to be 3 years of unsupervised probation, a $1500-2000 fine, 2 days of community service and mandatory “alcohol education”class. Most people get one day of that community service knocked off for the time they spent in jail after being arrested and I managed to get both days knocked off since they held me over midnight.

So anyway, having been through all this. Here’s my advice… Unless your case is in some way extraordinary (i.e. there were kids in the car, you were involved in an accident, the police really messed up something procedural) or your BAC is below (or very close to) the legal limit, I’d recommend *not* hiring an attorney until you’ve had your first court date. Chances are you’ll get the standard sentence and there’s nothing that any attorney could do to change that. In a worst case scenario, if it seems like they’re going to give you a sentence that’s above and beyond the standard one I mentioned above for some reason, then what I’d do is politely ask the judge for a continuance of your case so that you can consult with an attorney. It’s not guaranteed that they’ll honor your request, but after having my own trial date postponed so many times it seems to me that two or three delays per case is pretty much par for the course.

All that being said, I want to make it clear that I’m not saying that there’s no place in any DUI case for the assistance of an attorney or public defender, because that would be ridiculous. I’m simply suggesting that in a typical case, with a typical judge, the presence of an attorney is not going to change the sentence in any significant way. The reason that DUI attorneys are so numerous & so persistent in their salesmanship is that nobody (myself included) wants to believe that their case is “typical”. It’s only natural to look for a easy way out of a bad situation, but after seeing the other defendants in court and hearing the stories from all the other people in my DUI class over the past few weeks (more on that in a later post) it seems to me that the only way out of a typical DUI is to just suck it up, admit you made a mistake, be grateful that it didn’t turn out any worse than it did and just get it over with as quickly as possible.

If you’re reading this directly after being arrested, I know it might seem really bad or scary right now, but what I’ve learned throughout this whole process is that the penalties for a first-time DUI are not the end of the world and are not designed to inflict any extreme suffering. They are intended to be an enormous pain in the ass (i.e. not being able to drive, having to go to DUI class, paying more insurance & fines, etc.) that you will always remember and which will hopefully prevent you from making the same mistake again. In fact, probably the best example of this is simply the threat of what could happen in the case of a second or third offense, which includes much larger fines, longer suspension and even potential jail time. I know it sounds like a cliche, but having all that stuff on my mind for the past few months has really made me think about a lot of the decisions I was making, and while I’d rather have avoided the whole thing, I think it really proves the point that “that which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”.

Anyway, hope this has all been helpful, I’ll continue to update in the coming months (and years) as the whole process continues to work itself out. Feel free to write me at contact@duiforum.net with any questions or thoughts.

Where we stand, almost 1 month after my arrest…

Published
by
admin
on March 10, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

I’d like to be able to report more on the status of my DUI case at this point. I’d like to be able to tell you whether I’ve been damned or exonerated by the physical evidence, and what the status of my driver’s license and car insurance are and what sentence I can expect to face, but as much as I’d like for all these things to be the case, I remain in the dark. This is, for me anyway, the worst part about the proceedings so far, having to wait for the State to produce its evidence and formalize its charges, but I can take some comfort in the fact that I’m not alone in this situation I suppose. I’ve been informed by my attorney that this is “par for the course” in these proceedings, and that I should basically just sit tight and hope for the best. I can only hope that he’s right, and that another attorney might not have found a way to expedite the discovery process. But this is one of those things that I *hope* this site can help address, the almost complete information blackout that many people accused of DUI find themselves facing. By the time my case winds its way through the legal and administrative procedure of the courts and the DMV, I will have made as complete an account as exists on the internet of exactly what happened at each step along the way. But for now I wait, and hope for the best…

But, I suppose I might as well share the results of some of my DUI research while I’m waiting. I’ll start with this bit of common-sense legal advice that I found at the site “got-a-dui.com,” which is unsurprisngly hosted by a California attorney who specializes in criminal law and DUI defense. Here’s the relevant quote:

There are principally two reasons why a criminal case will settle on favorable terms: either problems of proof in the prosecution’s case which make it less likely that the prosecutor will win, or factors about the defendant that justify a better deal.

In drunk driving, DWI, or DUI cases, it is critical to find something wrong with the prosecutor’s case to force a better deal. Factors relating to the accused usually only arise in a negative context. That is, if the defendant has an extensive criminal history, additional punishment is heaped upon them, but if the defendant has an excellent driving record, and has never been in trouble before, it does them little good. It is frequently the case in a drunk driving prosecution that the accused has no prior criminal record, comes from a good background, is active in their community in a positive way, and is generally a fine person. Prosecutors, as a rule, care little about these things.

Conversely, prosecutors do care about the possibility of losing their case entirely. That is why it is important to select a DUI lawyer that has a demonstrated track record of success in trial work. It is by virtue of going to trial in an appropriate case that a drunk driving attorney demonstrates to his or her adversaries that they are not afraid of trial, that they are willing advocates for their cause. It is by going to trial in some cases that successful DUI lawyers are able to secure more favorable plea-bargains in others.

Now to some extent I’m sure that this passage is a bit of a marketing “scare tactic” on the part of the attorney, but there’s no question that it’s an effective one for DUI offenders with otherwise unblemished criminal records. But it’s worth considering the implications of this advice, particularly if you are arrested in a borderline or completely sober state. The key thing is to be observant; try to recall the exact sequence and process that the officers go through in questioning and arresting you. Most likely they’re operating from a script, and have been made to understand the consequences of diverging from it, but the chances are that they will fuck up some part of the procedure and it is these instances that you must recall and, if possible, document as best you can. Did the officers inform you why you were stopped? Did they inform you of the “implied consent” rule that I mentioned in previous posts? Were the differences between the blood & breath test explained properly and was the test administered by a qualified professional. Bearing in mind that the State will do everything in its power to strengthen its own case, imagine what specific claims they might make about your actions and behavior and try to find ways to counter these. One example of this that I read about, and which made a lot of sense in retrospect, is to call as many people as possible once you have been booked into jail, and converse with them for a few minutes, so that they might be able to serve as credible witnesses if the arresting officers try to claim that you were “slurring your speech” or otherwise appearing intoxicated. Ultimately, you are probably going to need an attorney in order to make the most effective use of this kind of counter-evidence, but by recalling these types of details and specific, you can give your attorney some good ammunition to work with in negotiating the terms of your case. As I said, this is probably common-sense advice, but I hope it proves useful regardless.

My (Alleged) DUI

Published
by
admin
on March 3, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Ok, so who the hell am I? What’s my miserable DUI story that ended up with me sitting here on a Sunday night and poking around in WordPress templates to create this site? Well it all started when I was driving home over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland on a Monday night just a few weeks ago. I’ll be honest with you, I drank a few beers that night, but I had also been running around, dancing and Karaoke singing for several hours on end, and by the time I was ready to drive home I had no doubt that I was OK to drive. I like to think of myself as a responsible and careful driver, and there have been several occasions in my adult life where I’ve had too much to drink, knew it, and crashed on a friend’s couch for the night. What I’m trying to say here is that I don’t have any kind of macho misconceptions about “driving better when I’m drunk” or anything like that. So when I climbed into my car and jumped onto the Bay Bridge website on my cell phone to check out which on-ramps were open, I was feeling pretty much as sober as I had 6 hours ago when I arrived in the city. After I confirmed my route and put my phone away I navigated through the city to the Essex St. on-ramp and motored happily onto the bridge, glad that I had avoided the enormous clusterfuck of traffic that usually plagues my weeknight trips into the city.

Once I made my way through the big construction nightmare on the west end of the bridge, traffic was very light (it was 11:30PM on a Monday night after all). I accelerated up to my normal crusing speed in these circumstances, probably around 65-75 MPH and was zipping along in the 2nd lane from the right (my favorite, as it makes merging or changing lanes unnecessary for 95% of my journey home). After passing through Treasure Island I was picking up a little bit of speed on the down-slope, but since the traffic was light I didn’t think much of it until… Oh Dammit! I’m getting pulled over…

Well shit, I thought to myself, here’s a fine way to end an otherwise enjoyable evening! Oh well, too late to worry about it now. Might as well just pull over and get this over with. So I pulled over to the side of the road (this happened just as I was leaving the bridge, so there was a shoulder here) and after giving me some further instructions about exactly where to park over his loudspeaker the CHP officer walked up to the car and let me know I had been pulled over for speeding. He asked me I knew how fast I had been going and I answered honestly, “About 75 or 80.” He then asked me if I knew what the speed limit on the bridge was, and I replied that I thought it was probaly 65. Well here came my first shock of the night. The speed limit on the Bay Bridge, a 5 lane restricted access freeway, is *actually* 50 MPH. Now I’m from Chicago, where we know a thing or two about artificially low speed limits (Lake Shore Drive… 45?) but this one really took me by surprise. Anyway, I was mentally preparing myself to pay what I now knew was going to be a absolutely ridiculous speeding ticket when the officer asked me if I had had anything to drink that night. Again, I wasn’t about to lie to him, so I said that I had had a couple of drinks, and he asked me to step out of the car. I complied and he began asking me a series of questions: “Are you on any medication?” “Have you had any trouble sleeping lately?” “When was the last time you ate?” and so on. I now know that he was running a script designed to determine whether I was absolutely shit-faced and had no idea where or who I was. Since this was not the case, I answered his questions and he then started in with the “Field Sobriety Tests.” He asked me to stand with my feet togther and my head tilted back while I silently estimated 30 seconds of time. He asked me to touch my thumb to my fingertips while counting 1…2…3..4…4…3…1… He asked me to lift one leg and balance on the other foot. He asked me to track his finger while my eyes while he moved it back and forth in front of my face. I was patiently goign through with all of these tests and doing pretty well at them I thought and finally he got out the little portable breathalyzer machine and asked me to blow into it. He mentioned something about “Of course, this isn’t part of the implied consent test” or something like that, but I wasn’t sure what he meant and in any case, I wasn’t about to refuse this test. After he finished with that test, he cuffed me and put me in the back of his car, (my car got towed away) and we head on down the the CHP headquarters on Telegraph. They searched me here and told me that I’d be asked to do another breathalyzer test, and that this one *was* part of the implied consent law. He also explained that the breathalyzer test would not preserve a sample of my breath, so whatever reading it made would be final and incontestable. My other option was to get back into the patrol car and head up to the hospital for a blood test, which could be preserved and retested. This seemed like a less sketchy option to me, so I made my decision and we drove over to Alta Bates hospital in Berkeley. After a nurse drew my blood here, we went back down to Oakland and I was finally read my rights and booked into North County Jail at about 2:30 AM.

I could go into great detail about my time in jail, but suffice to say, it was one of the most horrible and frustrating experiences of my life. After being told that I was to be held for a few hours and released, I ended up sitting around for the next 12 hours, missing work and being unable to get in touch with anyone to let them know where I was or what had happened to me. The cell I was placed in for the first 3 hours or so *did* have a phone in it, but since I figured I’d be getting out before anybody I knew was even awake, I just decided to sit tight and wait it out for the next few hours. After I was moved into another cell with no phone, and left there for the next 8 or 9 hours, I began to realize that perhaps I hadn’t made the right decision. At any rate, I finally did get out and caught a cab down to East Oakland where I paid something like $225 to get my car out of the impound. While I was waiting for the guys there to bring it around I met a nice guy who recommended a good attorney. Or anyway, I *hope* he’s a good attorney as I did end up retaining his services. As I continue to update this site, I’ll let you all know how that works out ;)

Aannnyway, to wrap things up here, I wanted to summarize what I learned during the night of my arrest. First of all, I did a little research on this whole “implied consent” thing that the arresting officer kept mumbling about. As it turns out, *none* of the roadside tests and questions, including the breathalyzer, are required by (California) law. You can refuse all of these and while it will dramatically increase the likelihood of your being “taken down to the station,” it won’t automatically lead to a license suspension. The only thing that *is* required by law are the in-station breathalyzer or the in-hospital blood test. Next, I learned that jail operates on a completely different schedule than the rest of the universe. They may not *want* to hold you there for 12 hours, but they’re just too inefficient and unmotivated to get it done faster in many cases. But who cares, right? There’s nothing but criminals in there! ;) I’ve learned a lot of other things about the various intracacies of DUI law since that night, but these will have to wait for another post. But perhaps the most important thing I learned is… The speed limit on the Bay Bridge is 50MPH! But I’ll talk more about that particular kick in the balls in another post. For now, I bid you good night…

Welcome to the DUI Forum

Published
by
admin
on March 2, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Hello Readers, I’m going to start at the very beginning with this post, so make yourselves comfortable and please hold your questions and comments until the end. I’m creating this site to serve what seems to be a pretty strong demand on the internet for information and discussion about DUI arrests, the legal & DMV proceedings, sentencing and anything else that may be useful. Why am I doing this? Well, like many of you, I was arrested a few weeks ago and charged with DUI. Since then I’ve been scouring the internet for any information I can find on the subject, and while there’s plenty of great stuff out there, I was getting a bit frustrated with finding the same “cut and paste” sections of the vehicle code and out-of-date sentencing info that seems to be prevalent on so many attorneys’ websites. What seemed to be missing from my search results was any *real* stories or experiences that might help me work out what to expect and how to prepare myself for the weeks and months following my arrest.

Now, I understand that being arrested for DUI is not the type of thing that most people probably want to share with the world, but for those of us who have never been in trouble with the law before, have very little experience dealing with the courts and attorneys, and are feeling totally embarassed and overwhelmed by the prospect of huge fines, potential jail time and all sorts of other horrible consequences stemming from what was in many cases an error in judgement that we already deeply regret, I just wanted to do what I could to help, and to hopefully make something positive out of a situation that’s been keeping me up at night for the last few weeks. So for those of you who might take offense at my site or the mission that I’m trying to accomplish, then I deeply apologize. I want to make it clear that this site is not intended to be about “beating” a DUI charge or anything of the sort. It’s just a place where people who are trying to make the best of a bad situation can share their experiences and find some real information that’s not tainted by the association of being on a scare-tactic website hosted by some “DUI Specialist” attorney.

Ok, so now that we’ve got that disclaimer out of the way, I’ll talk a little bit more about what I’m planning to do with this site. First, I’m going to share my own story. Over the coming days I’ll be posting in as much detail as possible about everything that happened surrounding my arrest and as I continue through the rest of the legal and administrative process I’ll follow up with the latest news and happenings. Next, I’m going to establish a forum where any readers of this site can post anonymously and share their own DUI questions and experiences. I know it’s idealistic to hope that this won’t get destroyed spam postings and that kind of stuff, but I’ll do my best to keep it under control (assuming that anybody even posts at *all*) and I’ll try to take an active part in any discussions that arise. Finally, I’m going to share the results of some of the research that I’ve been doing on DUI, in the hopes that it can help others as they resolve their own situations. This might include anything from assorted legal tidbits that I collect about the ins and outs of DUI laws, my experiences and interactions with different attorneys, judges and other folks, and anything else that I can think of that might be helpful to people in our situation.

It’s my hope that this site can serve as a great reference tool and community for people who are otherwise on their own in figuring this stuff out. If you ever have any questions or comments or want to get in touch with me for any reason, please just write to:

contact@duiforum.net