Articles Posted in DUI 1st Offense

In part 1 of this article, we began an overview of breath test refusals in DUI cases, and the larger subject of chemical tests as well as Michigan’s Implied Consent law. We saw how there are really 2 kinds of tests: a preliminary breath test (PBT) which is administered at the side of the road before an OWI arrest, and then a formal chemical test that comes after arrest. Although a “chemical test” can include either blood, breath or urine, in DUI cases, it’s limited to breath and blood, as urinalysis cannot be used to calculate person’s bodily alcohol content (BAC).

I explained that the refusal to submit to a PBT is only a civil infraction, and is very different from the refusal to submit to a chemical test as contemplated by Michigan’s Implied Consent law. If a person refuses a PBT, he or she only faces a fine and a penalty of 6 points on his or her driving record. In the real world, my team and I almost always negotiate the dismissal of a PBT charge as part of the resolution of an OWI charge. Although a person is legally “obligated” to take a PBT test, the failure to do so does NOT carry any potential suspension of his or her driver’s license.

In contrast, we then saw that refusing a breath or blood (i.e., chemical) test after arrest will automatically result in a 1 year suspension of a person’s driver’s license, unless a he or she timely requests and wins a hearing to challenge the refusal for 1 of the 4 specified legal issues before a Michigan Secretary of State hearing officer. We then looked at the how those issues are defined in the law. In this second half, we’ll dig a bet deeper to see what those legal issues really mean and how a person can still get his or her license back even after an Implied Consent refusal.

As Michigan DUI lawyers, we have to deal with breath test refusal issues almost everyday. We field a lot of questions about breath and blood tests, Implied Consent license suspensions, and everything related to a person having refused to provide breath sample when arrested for a DUI. This 2-part article will provide an overview of Michigan’s Implied Consent law, rather than any kind of granular analysis of the subject. Here, our focus will be wide, and cover the broader implications chemical testing and the law in Michigan DUI cases.

At its most basic, Michigan law requires any driver arrested for an alcohol-related traffic offense to submit to a chemical test when requested to do so by a law enforcement officer. Technically, a “chemical test” can be conducted on either a breath, blood or urine sample. In DUI cases, urine tests are largely useless, so they’re never really an issue. Although the officer (or trooper or deputy) can choose to request either a breath or blood sample from someone arrested for a DUI, most (but not all) of the time, a breath test is requested first, instead of a blood sample.

Michigan’s testing law is called “implied consent” because, at the time every person obtains a Michigan driver’s license, it is expressly noted that, by accepting that license, he or she agrees to provide a chemical test sample if arrested for an alcohol related traffic offense. In other words, he or she agrees, in advance, and as a condition of the issuance of that license, to provide a breath, blood or urine sample upon arrest for a substance-abuse related driving offense. This means that a person’s consent to such a test is implied (as in pre-given), just like his or her consent to being searched is implied if he or she goes through airport security.

In part 1 of this article about the 3 main ways a 1st offense DUI case in the Metro-Detroit area will impact your life, we saw how there will always be some kind of driving restrictions following a conviction, while in part 2, we noted that some kind of probation is almost certain to follow, as well. Here, in this 3rd installment, we’ll turn to final main a 1st offense OWI will affect you: it’s going to cost a lot of money.

It’s probably best to tackle this by first observing that, for everything I could or will say about a DUI and money, “it is what it is,” and that means expensive. Anyone trying to save money on a DUI is pretty much wasting his or her time. About the only expense a person can reduce is how much they spend on a lawyer, but that generally provides diminishing returns. In other words, whether you can afford it or not, this is going to be costly.

About a decade ago, there was a state-sponsored ad campaign in Michigan warning that a DUI would cost about $10,000. Adjusted for inflation, that still pretty much holds true today, as well. To be sure, there are places, even locally, where the fines and court costs for a DUI will be less, and other places where they will be significantly more, but however you cut it, a 1st offense DUI is not cheap.

In part 1 of this article, we began looking at the 3 main ways a 1st offense DUI in Michigan will affect your life. While most people’s greatest fear is going to jail, we noted that’s highly unlikely to happen, but that there are still plenty of other potential legal consequences to avoid or minimize. As I pointed out, unless a case is completely thrown out of court, there are 3 main things that will happen to everyone as the result of a DUI, and we then covered the first of them: driving restrictions.

Here, in this second part, we’ll look at the 2nd main way a DUI will affect your life: probation. Before we get to that, however, let me be repeat something: everybody wants to have their case dismissed or tossed out of court, and every lawyer should do everything possible to make that happen. However, the simple truth is that most cases DO NOT just “go away” because the police do not routinely make the kind of catastrophic mistakes that cause Judges to routinely dismiss them.

In the real world, a Judge will only exclude evidence or dismiss a DUI case because he or she has to, and that only happens if a lawyer has carefully examined everything and found some significant problem that leaves the Judge no choice. DUI cases that get dismissed are the exception, not the rule. Some lawyers make it sound like the only thing standing between a person and the dismissal of his or her charges is paying the attorney’s retainer, but that’s not how it works.

As Michigan DUI lawyers, we spend a major part of every workday closely involved with people going through drunk driving charges. Over the years, we have been asked every question imaginable, and walked our clients through every step of the DUI process a million times over. Because we handle OWI cases all day, every day, we have, quite literally, seen it all. This article will be about the 3 biggest ways a 1st offense DUI case will impact your life.

Let me begin by making clear that this is not any kind of scare-tactic piece. The reality is that jail can be avoided in almost every 1st offense DUI case here in the Greater-Detroit area of Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and surrounding counties. Moreover, no matter how things may look right now, they aren’t nearly as bad as you probably fear. In truth, a 1st offense DUI can is far more of an expense and inconvenience rather than the end of your world, and this even applies to those who hold some kind of professional license.

The intention behind Michigan’s DUI laws, especially as it relates to 1st offense cases, is not to ruin a person’s life or career, but rather to make a the whole experience so unpleasant that he or she will take the steps necessary to make sure it never happens again. There are numerous potential consequences that go with an OWI charge, but we’re going to focus on the 3 that are all but certain, unless a case gets completely tossed out of court.

In part 1 of this article, we began examining the rather serious implication that anyone facing a Michigan High BAC charge has some kind of drinking problem. While this is always a concern in High BAC cases, it really applies in any case where a person’s BAC result is elevated. This makes sense, given that it has been consistently shown that, as a group, DUI driver’s have a statistically higher incidence of alcohol problems than the population at large. That makes things worse for anyone facing the more serious “High BAC” OWI charge specific to having a bodily alcohol content that’s more than twice the legal limit.

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.

Here’s the thing most people fail to understand: minimizing one’s drinking, both overall and on the day in question, isn’t any kind of strategy that will help in a High BAC charge. Although it’s almost instinctive for people to make self-declarations that they’re not a big or frequent drinker, that they only had a few, or that they weren’t “that drunk” when they were driving, such statements are actually counter-productive to the outcome of a case.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s also true.

While everyone worries about staying out of jail and losing their driver’s license for a High BAC charge (technically called OWI with a BAC of .17 or Greater), there is another key concern often overlooked, or that even goes unnoticed, by a person scrambling to avoid the legal penalties in such a case; the perception that he or she has some kind of troubled relationship to alcohol. Anyone arrested for a High BAC is very much at risk to be seen within the court system as having an alcohol problem, and it is important to understand why that’s the case, in order to be able to do something about it.

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.

This ties into something so important, I recently completed an 8-part examination of it, and have even dedicated an entire topic section on this blog: the alcohol bias. We won’t re-examine it in much detail here, but the foundation of the bias is based upon that statistical reality that DUI drivers do, in fact, have a higher incidence of troublesome drinking than everyone else. This means that anyone walking into court for a DUI charge is seen as a member of that at-risk group. This is only exacerbated when you add a BAC result that practically screams “big drinker!”

In part 1 of this article, I began explaining how, although it is normal for anyone with professional employment, or who holds a professional license, to worry about losing their job or their occupational license because of a DUI, such an outcome is highly unlikely, especially in 1st offense cases. In the real world, this is a fear that almost never plays out. We saw that, contrary to how they’re often perceived, licensing bodies are not angry, punitive agencies just waiting to pounce and revoke licenses for things like DUI convictions.

Instead, as I tried to make clear, beyond having rather strict reporting requirements, the big risk for anyone with a professional license is that the licensing agency will require him or her to be “evaluated” to determine if they have any kind of substance abuse problem, and then required to complete any treatment deemed necessary as a result of that evaluation. As we’ll see in the coming paragraphs, the problem is that this takes place in an environment that, instead of being any kind of level playing field, is tilted far for toward the “better safe than sorry” side of things.

Even so, it goes without saying that a person is better off being able to keep his or her license, but also be required to complete any kind of treatment to do that, rather than simply having it taken away. The reality, however, is that (especially for medical professionals), we’re not talking about a few months of seeing a counselor once a week; the kinds of remedial measures required can be extremely demanding, and often include, in addition to anything the court orders, several AA or NA meetings per week, individual and group counseling, and regular breath and/or urine testing.

If you are facing a DUI charge and have any kind of professional employment, or hold a professional license, your worries go beyond just the potential legal consequences from the court. Unfortunately, a lot of legal marketing is fear-based, and tries to exploit the correlation between how much someone has to lose and how frightened they are when dealing with a drunk driving charge. Instead of doing that, I want to make clear, in this 2-part article, that for most people, including doctors, lawyers, teachers, and most other professionals, a single DUI will almost certainly NOT cost you your job or license.

My team and I have, quite literally, handled thousands of DUI cases. Short of a professional lion-tamer, I can’t think of a profession we haven’t represented. We’ve taken care of DUI charges (including 2nd offense cases) for more medical and other professionals than I could count, and absolutely none of them have lost their licenses, or their jobs. In almost every case, with some skillful planning that accounts for the legal, employment and licensure implications of an OWI charge, everything can be worked out just fine.

In part 1 of this article, we began an examination of how my firm educates our DUI clients, particularly in 1st offense DUI cases, to make sure they understand the whole process and take the appropriate steps to make sure it never happens again. I noted that everyone will, of course, say it won’t happen again, but that being a better lawyer means taking a few extra steps to help the client as a person, and not just help him or her out of a legal jam. We then looked at the critical role of the alcohol screening test and how it significantly determines the outcome of a case, and the importance of being thoroughly prepared for it. We concluded with the key observation that success in a DUI case is always best measured by what does NOT happen to you.

Educating the client isn’t merely about preparing him or her for things that will or might happen. Sometimes, it’s more about dispelling a person’s fears and misconceptions, as much as anything else. The issue of jail (or, really, the lack of it) serves as a good example for what I mean: I am undoubtedly the most vocal lawyer out there about the fact that, almost without exception, you won’t go to jail for a 1st offense DUI in the Metro-Detroit (meaning Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb Counties). I make that clear on both my website and in many of the more than 425-plus DUI articles (to date) I’ve written and published here, on this blog.

Despite all of that, my office gets calls and emails almost every day from people facing 1st offense DUI charges who, more than anything else, are freaking out and pleading for help to stay out of jail. I could make a killing if I just marketed my practice solely on the basis of “staying out of jail” in 1st offense DU cases. I could reassure people that it won’t happen, and do little else other than wait until the case is over to bask in the false glory of having kept them out. Morally speaking, that’s not the right thing to do, however…