Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

August 20, 2018

Arrested for a DUI? Now What? – Part 3

In part 2 of this article, we began our examination of the court process in DUI cases, beginning with the arraignment and pre-trial. Here, in part 3 of this article, we’ll continue our examination of the court process, starting with the legally required alcohol assessment test. By law, any person who pleads guilty to or is convicted of an alcohol-related traffic offense (i.e., a DUI) cannot be sentenced by the Judge until he or she undergoes a legally required alcohol assessment, sometimes called a “screening.” The actual assessment is a written set of questions about your alcohol and substance use history. Your answers to them are “scored” using a scoring key, and then compared to a scoring chart to determine whether you have, or are considered at risk to develop a drinking problem.

Nexter-300x150 After completing the alcohol assessment, you will then go through an interview with a probation officer (PO). The end result of all this is a written sentencing recommendation drafted by the probation officer that must be sent to the Judge to be used when you stand before him or her for sentencing. This recommendation lists specific things that the probation department believes you should be ordered to do (and not be permitted to do) as a result of your charge, including counseling and/or treatment.

Whatever else you read here, or anywhere else, you can take this to the bank: every Judge, in every Michigan court, follows this recommendation very closely. There is NEVER a case where a Judge makes any big, wholesale deviations from his or her probation department’s recommendation. In fact, it’s far more accurate to consider the sentencing recommendation a “blueprint” for what’s going to happen to you than anything else. In other words, a good recommendation equals a good sentence, and a better recommendation will result in a better sentence.

August 17, 2018

Arrested for a DUI? Now What? – Part 2

by Jeffrey J. Randa

In part 1 of this article, we began looking at the Michigan DUI process – specifically the police part of that process – starting out from your first contact with a police officer, the traffic stop and arrest, all the way through your release from jail thereafter. Here, in part 2, we’ll begin looking at the beginning of the court process in DUI cases. The first legal step in the court setting is called an arraignment. In many DUI cases, this whole step (and, therefore, the need to show up in court for it) can be waived by your lawyer, although some courts, like Detroit, Rochester Hills and St. Clair Shores usually don’t allow that. Technically, an arraignment is a court proceeding held before a Judge or Magistrate where a person is formally advised of his or her constitutional and procedural rights, the specific charge or charges being brought against them, and the maximum legal penalties for each. A person is then asked to enter a plea. Although the subject of arraignments can get very deep, what matters most here is that if you do have to go to court to be arraigned, you should ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS plead “not guilty.” To be clear, this is a procedural move, and has nothing to do with whether or not you are actually guilty or not.

In the suburban courts that don’t allow it, the main reason an arraignment can’t be waived is because the court wants to quickly set bond conditions, meaning things you will be required to do, and others you cannot do, while your case is pending. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, so hold on before you start sweating. Once you’re released from jail, you’re out. If you posted any money, then that will almost always be the amount of the bond set by the court, so it’s not like you’re going to be asked for more. Despite that, however, we always tell anyone to take $500 with them if they must go to court for an arraignment, especially if they didn’t have to pay anything when they were first released from jail.

Bond conditions are rules you have to follow while your case is going on. They include not leaving the state without the court’s permission, not getting into any more legal trouble, and, in every DUI case, not consuming any alcohol or using any drugs. To make sure a person complies with the “no drinking” and “no drugs” conditions, all courts will order some kind of alcohol and/or drug testing. This can be either breath (you’ll hear the term, “PBT”) or urine testing, or a combination of them both. Depending on various factors, including where your DUI is pending, that testing can be more or less frequent. Even if your arraignment is waived and you don’t have to go to court for it, bond conditions, including and especially the “no alcohol or drugs” provision will be ordered by the Judge the first time you appear before him or her.

August 13, 2018

Arrested for a DUI? Now What? – Part 1

by Jeffrey J. Randa

This article will answer the kind of questions that are often “googled” after a person has been released from jail following a DUI arrest, and that go something like “arrested for DUI now what?” We’ll look at how a DUI case unfolds, from first police contact, through your arrest, and all the way to the end of the court process. As a Michigan DUI lawyer, I concentrate my practice in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties, so our examination will focus on how things play out here, in the Tri-County, Metro-Detroit area. Rather than 1 or 2 long installments, I have chosen to break this article into 4 much shorter pieces for easier and quicker reading.

11873522964_9cb8eb5a44_b-300x295 DUI cases proceed through a certain set of fixed steps. In order to keep this article interesting, we’ll go over some of them more briefly than others where it’s logical to do so. For the reader interested in the gritty details of every stage, refer to the DUI section of this blog, where I have posted an in-depth examination of just about every facet of the DUI process within the more than 360 articles I have written, making it an almost unlimited resource for anyone interested in learning more. Thus, if a reader wants to dig deeper into any specific part of the DUI process, he or she can search through my articles and find exactly what they’re looking for. This installment is more of an overview of the process and how it plays out.

A DUI case begins well before your actual arrest, and sometimes, even prior to your initial police contact. Most of the time, things start by getting get pulled over, but there are all kinds of other ways people wind up talking to a police officer. In some cases, the police respond to an accident, while in other cases, the police find someone just sitting in their car somewhere. Under Michigan law, just being in the driver’s seat with the keys in the ignition is enough to charge someone with DUI, as our Supreme Court has ruled that doing so is good enough to be considered “operating” a vehicle. Although this literally punishes someone responsible enough to pull over and “sleep it off,” it doesn’t matter what you or I think of such reasoning, because, like it or not, that’s just the way it is. The larger point here, though, is that no matter how it occurs, a DUI case always starts at or before the first police contact.

August 10, 2018

DUI and Criminal Cases in the 52nd District Courts of Novi, Clarkston, Rochester Hills and Troy

by Jeffrey J. Randa

As a Michigan DUI lawyer whose courtroom practice is concentrated in the Greater-Detroit area (Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties), my team and I are in one of the 4 divisions of the 52nd district court almost all the time, and often enough, many times within the very same week. These 4 courts are all connected within the same division (whatever that means…), yet for as many similarities they share, there are also profound differences between them, and a DUI or other criminal case may play out very differently in one location over another.

In this article, I want to very briefly introduce each court, its Judges, and the municipalities within the jurisdiction of each. There are 10 Judges assigned to these 4 courts, and they have some predictable similarities, but also some some interesting differences. Yes, some are tougher than others, which means, on the flip side, that some are more lenient than others. These more “delicate” issues are best discussed within the confidence of the attorney-client relationship and in the privacy of the conference room. And if you read that last sentence as a skillfully worded deflection, you’re right.

None of the 52-4 courts are over the top in terms of fines and costs. This means that if you’re facing a DUI, and especially something like a 2nd offense DUI (or a 2nd offense DWLS or possession of marijuana case), then we have to focus more on saving your behind rather than your money. The notion that DUI cases are all about money, which often has merit, falls a bit short in these courts. As lawyers, we usually skip the numerical designation when talking about any of these courts, and instead identify each of them by name of the city or township where it’s located. With that, let’s begin in numerical, rather than alphabetical, order…

August 6, 2018

You must be done with Drinking to win a Michigan License Restoration Case

by Jeffrey J. Randa

In order to win a Michigan driver’s license restoration or clearance appeal, you must prove that you have quit drinking for good. This requires more than just saying so. In this very short article, I want to make clear that the first and main requirement to win your license back is that you no longer drink alcohol. Although I frequently publish articles about recovery and sobriety, my staff has suggested that I put up something brief and more straightforward, because we still get lots of calls from people who seem to misunderstand the concept of sobriety and mistakenly think that being sober means something other than that you don’t drink anymore. Thus, we’ll begin with this very simple declaration: you cannot win your license back if you still drink, however “occasionally,” or even if you think you can still drink at any point in the future.

Im-done-quotes5-1-300x237 We often hear from folks who think that they somehow “deserve” to be able to drink because they haven’t had a license or otherwise been in trouble for a long time. This kind of thinking misses the target by about a million miles, because the whole point of the license appeal process is to ensure that the only people who get back on the road are people who have quit drinking for good. The Michigan Secretary of State, through it’s Administrative Hearing Section (AHS), the body that decides driver’s license appeals, has a duty to protect the public by making sure that some risky drinker doesn’t get his or her license back, drive drunk again, and then kill someone.

You have to understand that, from the state’s point of view, once a person has his or her license revoked for racking up multiple DUI’s, he or she is considered too risky to be allowed to drive again unless and until he or she quits drinking for good. The state will never – and this is key – NEVER give a license back to someone with multiple DUI convictions who still drinks alcohol, or even thinks he or she can. The bottom line is that such a person has proven that, at least some of the times he or she drinks, bad and dangerous decisions can follow. That, in and of itself, is considered too much of a risk. The interests of public safety are much greater than the transportation inconvenience of someone who, by law, has been categorized as a “habitual alcohol offender.” On the other hand, the state also knows that people who don’t drink are exactly zero risk to drink and drive.

August 3, 2018

Recovery in Michigan DUI and Driver’s License Restoration Cases

by Jeffrey J. Randa

As a Michigan DUI and driver’s license restoration lawyer, I deal with problems caused by drinking all day, every day. To be sure, most people arrested for a 1st offense DUI don’t have a drinking problem, but it is also a well established fact that, as a group, DUI drivers do have a higher incidence of such problems than the population at large. By the time someone gets to his or her 2nd DUI, however, the likelihood that he or she is struggling with a troubled relationship to alcohol goes from merely possible to very probable, and when it’s a 3rd (or subsequent) DUI, the question shifts from having a problem to how serious it has become. In driver’s license restoration cases, where the existence of a drinking problem is presumed, the focus turns to what has been done to fix it, and whether the person can prove that he or she is a safe bet to never drink again. In this article, I want to look at the concept of recovery from a problematic relationship to alcohol.

spirituality-300x274 It is a given that nobody sets out to develop a drinking problem. Sure, there are some people who, by their partying behavior and wild attitude seemed destined to run headfirst into one, but had you ever confronted them during the time they were acting all crazy and drinking too much, they would have dismissed your concerns. The point is that when a problem begins to develop within a person, he or she is almost always the most blind to it, and usually the last to see it – if they ever do. The sad truth is that most people either don’t ever see themselves as having an alcohol problem or, if they do, are unable to get over it. Thus, it is a starting point for any discussion of recovery that most alcoholics (that term is used loosely here, and really means anyone whose drinking has begun to cause problems) DO NOT recover. In fact, from what we have come to know about the development, diagnosis and treatment of alcohol use disorders, the simple fact remains that recovery is far more the exception than it is the rule.

Although the concept of “recovery” is deep enough in its own right to fill a library full of books, one general and universally true observation is that people don’t get sober because drinking is working out well for them. When a person really decides to quit drinking for him or herself (rather than for someone else), it’s often because he or she has hit some kind of “bottom.” The idea of hitting bottom seems simple enough, but in the real world, even among those who do recover, some people hit many false bottoms before they hit the real one. When someone hits that real bottom, however, there is no mistaking it, because it becomes the pivot point for huge changes that will dramatically affect the rest of their lives. Whether sobriety comes as a result of hitting bottom, or more gradually, by a kind of tipping of the scales in favor of not drinking anymore, once you are really in recovery, then you just “know” this, and feel it in the very fiber of your soul.

July 30, 2018

The Substance Use Evaluation in Michigan Driver’s License Restoration Cases

by Jeffrey J. Randa

There really is no way to overstate the importance of the role of the substance use evaluation in a Michigan driver’s license restoration or clearance case. In a very real sense, the substance use evaluation (abbreviated as SUE, and often mistakenly called a substance “abuse” evaluation) is really the foundation of a driver’s license restoration appeal. Over the years, many counseling operations have popped in and out of existence with the promise of providing really favorable evaluations. That may sound appealing at first, but the hearing officers from the Michigan Secretary of State’s Administrative Hearing Sections (AHS) have been onto that gimmick forever, and instead of being fooled by it, look instead for indicators of real integrity in the evaluation. Thus, we begin with the idea that the evaluation must be an accurate, honest and sincere clinical assessment.

thisisimportant-279x300 This is important, because it means that to wind up with a good evaluation that bears the required hallmarks of integrity, you have to be genuinely sober in the first place. If you still drink, or think you can still drink, forget trying to win a license appeal, and forget trying to fool a good evaluator. The whole reinstatement process is designed to make sure that only those people who do not drink, and who have the commitment and ability to remain alcohol-free for good, are allowed back on the road. For everything we can and will say about it, the main purpose of the evaluation is to provide the hearing officer with a clinical analysis of how likely a person is to NOT drink again. A competent evaluator isn’t going to mistake someone who still drinks, but talks a line of BS about not drinking anymore, for someone who is really sober and has made the dramatic life changes that go along with that.

The evaluation itself is actually a form provided by the state. Some evaluators use their own format instead, but any homemade design must still provide all the information required by the state’s form. Personally, I don’t care for evaluations done on anything other than on the state’s form. One of the problems with that, beyond making the information harder to read and therefore more difficult to understand, is that some evaluators go off and start adding information they feel is helpful, taking what would have been a 2 or 3 page state form and stretching it out over even more pages. The SUE is really like a tax form, and provides spaces for all the necessary information without the need to paste in the dreaded “see attached” and add more pages.

July 27, 2018

Michigan DUI and a Medical, Nursing or Professional License through LARA

by Jeffrey J. Randa

If you hold any kind of professional license in the state of Michigan and you get a DUI, you are going to have to report it. This article will be a very short overview of a deep and complex subject. In fact, a person can easily get lost in the details involved in all the license stuff, so I want to cut a quick path to what is more the heart of the matter. Also, I want to turn away from all the scary, fear-based marketing stuff and make it clear that, at least in 1st and 2nd DUI offense cases, you will almost certainly NOT lose your occupational license. It is important to point out that there is a huge difference between what happens in the real world and what is theoretically possible on paper. A 1st offense OWI, for example, technically carries a possible 93-day jail sentence. With the possible exception of cases brought before one Judge in the Metro-Detroit area, nobody goes to jail in a 1st offense case, and even if that Judge does lock someone up, it’s only for a handful of days.

license-compressed-300x262 This is significant because people often make the mistake of rushing to some lawyer they think can save them, and thus buying into what they want to hear at the moment, when they’re scared. A person will hop online and get just enough information to start freaking out, and then fall prey to the kind of fear-based marketing that I deplore. To be clear, if you have a professional license, you are certainly going to have to report your DUI, but that’s often all there is to it. In the healthcare world, for example, a DUI will almost certainly result in some kind of discipline, but any kind of license suspension is highly unlikely in a 1st offense case if things are handled properly. That said, a suspension is all but certain if it is discovered (and it will be discovered, so you can’t hide it) that a person failed to report a drinking and driving conviction. Within my DUI practice, I represent a lot of people with medical and nursing licenses. To this day, I have NEVER had any client of mine have his or her license revoked, and, as a DUI lawyer, I’ve handled countless 1st offense cases and plenty of 2nd offense cases for medical professionals.

The real risks for 1st time offenders is a reprimand, and the possibility of having to be evaluated for a substance abuse problem, and having to attend counseling thereafter. In the real world, counseling and oversight are far more probable in any kind of 2nd offense case (and by that, I mean even if a person is charged with a 1st offense DUI but has a prior alcohol or drug-related conviction). This is where I come in; beyond being a DUI lawyer, I bring a post-graduate education in addiction studies to the table. I fundamentally understand the development, diagnosis and treatment of alcohol and drug problems. Key to being able to help a client through both the court and administrative process is a working knowledge of how diagnoses are made and the various treatment modalities that are available for them. Over-diagnosis is and always has been a common problem in the legal forum. Moreover, this needs to be understood in the context that licensing bodies exist with the mission to protect the public from unsafe practitioners (better safe than sorry, right?).

July 23, 2018

1st offense DUI in Michigan – The Importance of your BAC Result

by Jeffrey J. Randa

One universal truth for anyone facing his or her 1st offense DUI charge is a general fear of the unknown. Obviously, anyone charged with a High BAC offense has at least some understanding of the importance of his or her BAC result. While that number is important in each and every DUI case, its role is far more front and center in 1st offense cases, regardless of whether the charge is simply OWI (Operating While Intoxicated) or OWI with a BAC of .17 or greater (High BAC). In this article, I will highlight some of the more important reasons for that. This is the kind of subject that that we could either dance around politely, or, as I will do here, tackle head-on, without mincing words.

We need to start with the proposition that the whole world believes that the higher your BAC, the drunker you were. Now, having just said that, I can almost hear many people saying what everyone in the DUI world hears all the time – “I’m not a big drinker!” That may be so, but that has nothing to do with the fact that, as a hard and fast rule, a higher BAC means you drank more and were, therefore, more intoxicated. However you cut it, nobody has 3 glasses of wine over the course of 5 hours and blows a .18. Moreover, and no matter what you and I think or say about it, it matters far more what the Judge and the probation officer assigned to your case believe. Whatever else, you can take it to the bank that everyone in the criminal justice system assumes, as a matter of fact, that your BAC correlates directly with how much you had to drink and how drunk you were.

This is really important, because it’s right about here that people start to make bad decisions about handling their case. Sure, it probably feels good to speak with a lawyer who agrees with you and tells you what you want to hear and doesn’t speak as candidly as I am here, but think about that last line in the preceding paragraph: “…you can take it to the bank that everyone in the criminal justice system assumes, as a matter of fact, that your BAC correlates directly with how much you had to drink and how drunk you were.” That is an ironclad fact. If you don’t work from that as a starting point in handling your DUI case, then you’ve already begun with a misstep. The flip side of this is also important, because the lower a BAC score, the easier it will be to believe that the person charged is not a big drinker.

July 20, 2018

DUI, Ignition Interlock and Probation Violations for Drinking – Stop and Think!

by Jeffrey J. Randa

The underlying idea for this article came from Ann, my senior assistant, as we were discussing a case where someone had violated the terms of either their ignition interlock or probation by drinking. Although I can’t recall which it was, I had Ann send me an email using the exact phrase she used in expressing her own frustration at the time – “when has NOT drinking ever screwed you up?” – and waited for the right time to use it in an article. My practice is concentrated in DUI cases pending in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties and Michigan driver’s license restoration and clearance appeals for people who live anywhere in Michigan, or who have relocated to some other state. As such, I deal with fallout from people drinking alcohol all day and every day. In this article, I hope to give someone who is in any kind of legal trouble where they should not be drinking a reason to pause and think twice before doing so.

3010-267x300 The consumption of alcohol leads to a lot of problems for some folks. To be sure, most people never run into legal issues as a result of drinking. If they do its something like an MIP as a kid, or maybe a DUI as an adult, but they learn their lesson and never get into trouble again. Yet for all of those who either never get in trouble or who get past one unfortunate incident involving alcohol, there are plenty enough who seem to keep drinking despite the fact that they keep getting into trouble for it. This kind of self-defeating behavior is clear in repeat offense DUI cases, but it also is there, if not so obviously, in probation violation and ignition interlock violation cases where someone gets caught after having consumed alcohol when they shouldn’t have. As I noted in the previous installment, the problem with articles like this is that most people usually find them after the fact, when they’re already in trouble. Even if that’s the case here, I want to give the reader something to think about so that he or she can resolve to not make the same mistake again.

The majority of probation violations, especially in DUI cases, occur because someone tests positive for alcohol. This is really the crux of what Ann meant; when someone keeps getting in trouble for drinking, it might be time to take a break and ask, “when has NOT drinking ever screwed me up?” Although many probation violation and ignition interlock violation cases share the same cause – drinking – everything else about them is different. In DUI cases, I make my living in court keeping my clients out of jail, even after they’ve violated probation by drinking when they were forbidden by a Judge’s order from doing so. As we’ll see, things are a lot different, and, yes, even worse, if someone drinks alcohol and winds up with an ignition interlock violation brought by the Michigan Secretary of State, because it means losing your license all over again. For good. Let’s start there first, and get to probation violations in the latter part of this article.