Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
It’s normal to be stressed out after being arrested for a DUI. This is all the more true for people of good standing who never imagined themselves in the backseat of a police car, much less spending a night in jail. Unfortunately, the stress of facing a DUI often gives rise to a desperate urge to “fix this” right away. In this article, I want to make clear that while such feelings are normal, the reality is that things aren’t as bad as they may seem to you right now, and that the first and best thing you should do is to take a deep breath, calm down, and not act out of panic.
This is really the opposite message of the fear-based legal marketers you have probably already encountered. For all the things that can be said about that approach (and make no mistake, lawyers use it because it does work to bring in clients), the fact is, reacting fearfully is not any kind of “intelligent” or proper way to handle a DUI case. Better outcomes are the result of experience and the application of careful and deliberate planning, rather than unfocused emotional reaction. Remember, success in a DUI case is always best measured by what does NOT happen to you.
Although facing a DUI may trigger something of a “fight or flight” response, the fact is, once you’re facing a charge, it’s too late to run away from it, and it is not the kind of thing you brawl your way out of, either. Any kind of legal fight needs to be based on sound strategy, not panicked thrashing. A skilled lawyer will meticulously examine all the evidence in a case to look for anything that can genuinely be challenged, rather than just bark about all the things that could, in theory, be wrong with it. The facts of each case need to be assessed rationally, not emotionally.
Although I don’t want to focus too much on Sobriety Court, there is another facet to this worth mentioning before we move on – kind of the flip side of the coin, so to speak. While it is required that a person admits to needing some kind of help with his or her drinking in order to get into sobriety court, there are plenty of people who aren’t interested in anything like that or who otherwise maintain that they don’t have any problem and are merely seen by the system as being in denial.
This led us to explore the things that either will, or are very likely to happen to someone convicted of a 2nd or 3rd offense charge, including driver’s licenses sanctions, as well as the potential consequences to anyone who holds a professional license, or for whom a repeat offense DUI will have an adverse impact on his or her employment. I pointed out that, by operation of law, anyone convicted of a repeat offense DUI in Michigan is labeled a “habitual alcohol offender,” and is presumed to have an alcohol problem.
To be sure, the biggest and most obvious difference between a 1st offense DUI and 2nd and 3rd offense charges is the seriousness of the matters. While there is a veritable laundry list of potential legal penalties for all DUI cases, with plenty unique to 2nd and/or 3rd offense cases, an important part of our focus in this piece will be on the things that either will, or are very likely to actually happen. Beyond penalties, there is just something fundamentally problematic, in every sense of the word, about a repeat offense DUI that is entirely absent in a 1st offense case.
n terms of luck, this means that, on the one hand, if a case has been assigned to the most impatient Judge around who is known for not being interested in any excuses about anything, that’s bad luck. On the other hand, if the presiding Judge is known to be “forgiving,” then that’s good luck. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done about the Judge to whom a case is assigned, other than to make the best of the situation.
Here, I’ll make 3 important points: First, it’s far easier for me to deal with people who have already tried and lost than it is to waste time attempting to talk someone out of it in the first place. Second, if someone does win on their own, then good for them, and they can never say I tried to discourage them out of my own financial self-interest. Third, when my team and I take a case, we guarantee to win it, so whether you come to us first, or after you’ve tried on your own, we’ll make sure that win your license back and can drive again.
We concluded part 1 by pointing out that about the worst thing a person can do is exactly what just about everybody does, in fact do, and that’s insist that they’re not a big drinker, that they don’t drink that much, or not that often, and/or that, on the day of their arrest, they really didn’t have that much to drink. As I pointed out, the people who work in the court system hear this same kind of stuff so much that they don’t really pay attention to it, and, moreover, don’t believe it anyway. This kind of minimization of one’s drinking will do nothing to actually help a case.
In order to keep this article of manageable length and on point, we won’t get into some big, general examination of High BAC cases, but rather why the very term “High BAC” generates an extra-negative perception, and what can be done to counter that. It is important to begin by noting that even though the main component of a High BAC charge is the elevated BAC result itself, that’s really just “the icing on the cake,” so to speak, because it builds upon the long-established fact that, as a group, DUI drivers have a higher rate of drinking problems than the population at large, meaning people who don’t get a DUI.
For as much power as they have to approve or deny license appeals, hearing officers are constrained to exercise it within very strict rules. This is important, because even many lawyers don’t know the ins and outs of these rules, and fewer still work with them enough to really understand how they are interpreted and applied by each hearing officer. People who lose a “do-it-yourself” license appeal (or who lose with some lawyer who does not concentrate in this field) often become frustrated at their lack of success, and wrongly blame the hearing officer, without understanding how the application of the rules controlled the outcome of their case.
This means that finding the “best” DUI lawyer is really about getting the best person for your case, more than anything else. This, in turn, is dependent on things like the facts of the case, where it’s located, and how well the lawyer and the client “fit” and work together. Some people get along better with the kind of legal “buzzsaw” who, taking a shotgun approach, challenges everybody and everything within a case, while most others do better with a more thoughtful approach. And as much as someone might prefer one personality type over another, the lawyer has to be the right fit for the case itself, as well.