Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
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.
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.
To keep this article short, let’s skip all the background analysis about the why and how of violations and begin with the proposition that when you win your license back, the order granting it also contains some very specific instructions about proper ignition interlock use. Unfortunately, many people, in the excitement of being able to drive again, stop reading at the point that tells them where to go to get the interlock installed, and don’t read all the way through to the section about proper interlock use. Others may read it, but either “skim” that section too quickly or otherwise forget most, if not all of it, because things seem to be working just fine and they’re not having any problems with the machine. At least for the time being.
This is not just important, it is everything! The Michigan Secretary of State’s primary focus in license reinstatement cases is to screen out those people who present any risk to ever drink and drive again. The SOS has, for its part, correctly concluded that people who do not drink will not drink and drive, so it has drawn a line in the sand right there, and will only return a license to those people who can prove that they have genuinely quit drinking, and are a safe bet to never drink again. This logic here is really quite straightforward.
A recent experience I had at a violation hearing serves as an excellent example to illustrate my point. My client, for whom I had originally won a license, was violated for missing several rolling retests (meaning that when his interlock unit requested a breath test he didn’t provide one) and for what is called “tamper/circumvent” (because the unit recorded that he had disconnected the interlock handset several times). Although he was able to clear himself for both of those things, his revocation was upheld because, although not part of his formal violation, he also broke some other rules regarding his restricted license. This really gets to the point I’m trying to make here.
In fact, because of the way the law works, if a person whose license has already been revoked has anything placed on their driving record that indicates they were driving, their license will be re-revoked for the same period of time it was originally taken away for (either 1 or 5 years). There is no way to avoid this once something makes it on a person’s driving record, so it is absolutely necessary to make sure that nothing goes on there in the first place. If a person is cited for or charged with any kind of moving violation, including DWLS or DWLR, keeping it completely off their record is essential, and doing that often requires skillful legal maneuvering.
If you wanted to boil down the entire driver’s license restoration and clearance process into one short sentence, it would go much like this: you must prove to the Michigan Secretary of State, through its Administrative Hearing Section (AHS), that you have completely quit drinking alcohol and will never do so again. It really is that simple. Anything else that seems complex about the process has to do with proving sobriety. In the previous article on this blog, I looked at the 3 main reasons why winning a license appeal is so hard, and to a large extent, everything examined there had to do with proof and proving sobriety.
This is due, in part, because of that main rule that govern’s license restoration and clearance cases. The sections that’s most important to our concerns here comprises just 27 of more than 900 words of that rule: “The hearing officer shall NOT order that a license be issued to the petitioner unless the petitioner proves, by clear and convincing evidence, all of the following…” (emphasis added). This wording is critically important, but it is all too easily (and frequently) overlooked. Think about this; the rule governing license appeals essentially begins with a negative mandate telling the hearing officer to NOT grant a license unless certain conditions are met. The law could just as easily have been written to say something like “The hearing officer shall issue a license if the petitioner, by clear and convincing evidence, proves all of the following,” but it didn’t There was a conscious, deliberate choice to say no, right out of the gate.
It is not unusual for me to be contacted by people who’ve lost right after they get the bad news from the Secretary of State. One of the first things they want to know is if they can appeal the decision. I have to explain that while appealing to court is, legally speaking an option, your chances of winning are somewhere between slim to none, especially for those people who played lawyer and represented themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, but over the course of my 27-plus years as a lawyer, I have NEVER seen anyone who lost a do-it-yourself appeal who I thought had ANY chance of winning an appeal in court.
Procedurally, a hearing mostly involves answering questions. Depending on which hearing officer is presiding over it, most of the questions will either be asked by him or her, or by the lawyer, instead. Every hearing involves a certain number of the same core questions, although each hearing officer has his or her own particular areas of interest. For example, if a person answers that he or she still goes to AA meetings, one hearing officer may ask something about the steps, a second may want to know how often he or she attends, while yet another may just say “okay,” nod, and then move on to a different subject.
What are those “other” criteria? Here we stumble into things that have developed as interpretations of the license appeal rules. Most of these things are either not obvious or otherwise unknowable no matter how many times you read the published rules. In many of my previous articles, I have called these mostly unwritten requirements “a million little rules.” How many ever there actually are, the larger point is that these are not specific points of law, but rather the interpretation and application of the broader law and rules in the real world.