As a busy Michigan DUI lawyer whose drunk driving practice focuses on Oakland, Macomb and Wayne Counties, one of the busiest places I go to is the 52-3 district court in Rochester Hills. Beyond cases arising in Rochester and Rochester Hills, his 3-Judge facility handles all the criminal and DUI matters for 9 other municipalities, including Addison Township, Auburn Hills, Lake Angelus, Oakland Township, Orion Township, Oxford Township, Village of Lake Orion, Village of Leonard and the Village of Oxford. When you just skip over the township and village designations, it only makes sense that any court covering thriving places like Auburn Hills, Lake Orion and Rochester handles a lot of drinking and driving cases, and this court certainly does.
This is a tough court. The reader is almost certainly here because either he or she is facing a DUI, or is looking for relevant DUI information on behalf of someone close. However one gets to this blog, it has been a cornerstone of my writing to try and provide useful information. To start any discussion of Rochester Hills 52-3 district court without first acknowledging that it is widely known as “tough” is to ignore reality to such a degree that anything said thereafter is essentially useless. If you’re facing a DUI charge in this court, you are going to have some work to do. The good news is that this court has no “policy,” or even practice, of sending anyone to jail in 1st offense drinking and driving cases. Moreover, as far as any notion of jail goes, this court is not, by most standards, in any way excessive about it, even in 2nd offense DUI cases.
Probation, however, is a big thing in this court, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a probation department, anywhere, that has a stable of probation officers with nearly as much education as those on staff at the 52-3 district court. And while that means your probation officer will definitely be smarter than the average bear, it also means that you’ll be expected to comply with all conditions of bond and probation as ordered by the Judge, and for what this court doesn’t hand out in terms of jail, it tends to make up with heavy duty probation. Even so, the good news is that amongst the 3 Judges, Julie Nicholson, Lisa Asadorian and Nancy Carniak, there is no “meanness.” None of these Judges has an axe to grind, but merely the very reasonable expectation that DUI drivers don’t become repeat offenders.
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