Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
The worst part about a 2nd offense DUI is that it is a second offense. This is not meant sarcastically, nor is meant to just restate the obvious. In this article, I want to help the reader understand more than just the legal implications of a 2nd offense OWI charge. Most of my articles are of the “what you can expect” variety, examining things from an inside-looking-out perspective. In this piece, we’re going to flip things around and take an outside-looking-in view in order to see how the person facing the DUI is perceived by the courts.
This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that perception matters, and, as the saying goes, perception shapes reality. For all the analysis that we could get into, the bottom line is that under the law, and within the court system, anyone facing a 2nd offense DUI charge is presumed to have a problem with drinking. I point this out here so that any reader who wants to stop and explain that he or she is somehow different, or some kind of exception to that, will hold that thought and let me explain. Whatever else, it doesn’t matter what you think, or what I think; what will happen to you is based entirely on what the Judge thinks.
My job, as the DUI lawyer, is to positively influence that thinking as much as possible. There is a lot that can and should be done to produce the best outcome possible, but as a starting point, a person must understand that when facing a 2nd offense DUI, it is automatically assumed that something is up with him or her and alcohol. It is also automatically assumed that most people will try and convince everyone otherwise, and that, generally speaking, the more they do that, the deeper a hole they dig for themselves. This is a prime example of where a person should remain silent and let me do the talking.
When someone contacts me about a license restoration or clearance appeal, the first thing I want to know is the last time he or she had a drink. There is no way to overstate this: proving you have quit drinking for a sufficient period of time and have the commitment and tools to remain alcohol-free is the absolute key to winning a driver’s license appeal. Nothing else matters without sobriety.
In a very real way, I seemed to have overlooked the recovery aspect, probably because it’s so central to who I am and the work I do. To be sure, my articles about sobriety leave no doubt that my understanding of the development, diagnosis, treatment of, and recovery from alcohol and drug problems runs very deep, and goes miles beyond the legal aspects involved in winning a license appeal. Having completed a post-graduate program of addiction studies, I bring a healthy measure of clinical knowledge unmatched by any other lawyer I know.
One that is very important and, indeed, pervasive, is what I call the “alcohol bias.” Courts have been getting tougher on DUI cases year after year ever since I became a licensed attorney nearly 30 years ago, and that’s only going to continue. Within a few weeks of me starting this article, the husband of a local Judge was killed by a drunk driver, and 16 days later, an entire Michigan family of 5 people were killed on I-75 in Kentucky by another drunk driver. Those are just some of the most recent local DUI-related things to take place and receive lots of negative attention within less than a month of when this piece was written.
My analysis is influenced by a lot more than just my being a DUI attorney, because I also bring a strong clinical perspective to this, as well, having completed a post-graduate program of addiction studies and having worked daily, for almost 3 decades now, with both addicted and recovering populations. I believe that my job is to help my clients in every way possible, not just in the purely legal sense. Of course, it would be easier for me to just charge a fee and just focus on the legal stuff, but my conscience always reminds me to treat others as I would wish to be treated, so I live and work by that golden rule.
In each and every 2nd or 3rd offense DUI case, the whole world, and especially the court system, believes the person has a drinking problem. One of the chief aims of the legal process is to help a habitual offender (that’s the legal term in Michigan for anyone who gets up a 2nd or 3rd DUI) understand that however infrequently he or she may drink, whenever they do, it’s risky. The court’s goal in any 2nd or 3rd offense DUI is to get a person to stop drinking for good, if not for his or her own sake, then at least for the safety of the public.
More than anything else, it shows that the person was never committed to abstinence as a component of sobriety. Only when a person genuinely accepts and understands that his or her relationship to alcohol has become troublesome does he or she also know that any drinking thereafter is a problem. That kind of insight changes everything.
The whole issue of location is easy to bring up, but quite a bit harder to explain, because it must be done diplomatically. Everybody knows that some courts are tougher than others, and that Judges can be all over the map in terms of being lenient or not. No lawyer, including me, wants to disparage any Judge, or in any way play “favorites.” Our job is to work with them, day-in and day-out. It’s a given that, in the privacy of a lawyer’s conference room, a client might hear that this Judge is a “teddy bear,” and that one is a “hard-a$$,” but not in an article like this.
In Metro-Detroit, 2nd offense drunk driving cases are not like 1st offense or 3rd offense charges. I mean this beyond the mere numbers 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. No matter how you cut it, 2nd offense cases are treated almost uniformly across the local region. Here’s what I mean: the way a 1st offense case is handled, and ultimately worked out, can be VERY different from court to court, so that a person facing his or her first DUI in Rochester or Troy will have a much different experience than another whose case is in Shelby Township, or New Baltimore. Those experiences, in turn will be different still from someone with a 1st offense case in Plymouth/Canton or Woodhaven. In 1st offense cases, location essentially rules.
Almost without fail, the next thing I get asked is something like, “how am I supposed to keep my job?”, or “how do they expect me to support my family?” In this article, what I want to make clear is that the law not only “doesn’t care,” but it actually intends for this to hurt. In the grand scheme of things, the law is fashioned so that the hardship of not having a license is something that should have been considered before a person gets another DUI. One of the Michigan Secretary of State’s Administrative Hearing Section (AHS) hearing officers (these are the people who decide driver’s license restoration appeals) explains it, when people characterize their DUI record as “a mistake,” like this: “A mistake is when you date something using the last year, right after New Year. When you drove drunk, you committed a crime, and when you did it again, you became a habitual criminal.”