To win a Michigan driver’s license restoration or clearance appeal case, a person must prove certain things (more on that later) by what the law specifies as “clear and convincing evidence.” Translated into baseball terms, this means that one’s proofs must be roughly amount to what is the equivalent of hitting a home run. It’s important to understand this, because anyone undertaking a driver’s license appeal without a clear understanding of what kind of evidence is necessary to win will almost certainly wind up losing.
Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding in the driver’s license appeal world is that NEEDING to drive plays any role in the process. It does NOT. As we’ll see, “needing” a license has absolutely nothing to do with being to win it back once it has been revoked for multiple DUI convictions. The law sets out very specific criteria that a person must meet in order to regain driving privileges. The focus of this article will be on that “clear and convincing evidence” legal standard, and what it means in the real world.
We’re going to explore all of this in simple, plain-English simple terms. To really get a handle on all this, though, the reader has to understand a few things first. For most people, a driver’s license appeal only becomes necessary after his or her driving privileges have been revoked for multiple DUI’s. That’s key, because under Michigan law, once a person has been convicted of 2 DUI’s within 7 years, or 3 DUI’s within 10 years, he or she become legally categorized as a “habitual alcohol offender.” As a consequence of that, he or she is also PRESUMED to have some kind of alcohol problem.