Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
As busy Michigan DUI lawyers, my team and I deal with the circumstances surrounding OWI arrests every day, all day long. As soon as you begin looking online for anything DUI related, you find hit with more info and analysis than you could ever use (or want). Despite all that noise, the simple truth is that a DUI sometimes just “happens,” and is a single mistake in judgment, not a sign or symptom of some underlying problem. This is a fact too often overlooked in the legal system, and there’s a bit of danger in that.
The court system, for its part, is essentially hard-wired to read every possible risk factor into an OWI arrest. As I’ll show later, there is an explanation for this, but it’s cold comfort for anyone who simply screws up one night and then winds up feeling treated like an out-of-control alcoholic. I always point out that success in a DUI case is best measured by what does NOT happen to you. At the end of the day, the fact remains that most people who get a DUI will learn from it, never get another, and therefore don’t need all kinds of classes and counseling.
For starters, it’s pretty much a given that everyone facing a DUI will jump up and down and say that their case “just happened.” On the other side of the coin, however, there are some Judges who are suspicious of any and all such claims. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, because it has been repeatedly demonstrated fact that DUI drivers, as a group, have a statistically higher incidence of drinking problems than the population at large, meaning those people who have NOT been arrested for a DUI.
In the real world, the best possible outcome in a DUI case is to knock it out before it goes anywhere in court. While very few DUI cases actually go to trial and win (the overall percent, based on arrests for regular DUI charges, meaning OWI and OWVI, is well below 0.2% (that’s zero-point-two percent)), plenty of them do get dismissed because they do NOT survive a challenge to the evidence. This can only happen, however, if the lawyer first obtains, and then carefully analyzes the evidence, and ultimately finds something useful.
This is probably most consequential in the context of a 2nd offense DUI case more than any other. Despite the competing marketing pitches of different lawyers, the real truth is that a 2nd offense straddles the polar extremes between a 1st offense and a 3rd offense. In the real world, a 1st offense can, with proper handling very often be treated as more of a “mistake” rather than anything else, while a 3rd offense, by contrast, is always perceived and should be treated as a very serious matter.
The best thing that can happen to a person experiencing problems with alcohol is getting to the point where he or she does see a connection between their drinking and many (or all) of the problems in their life, and then decide to do something about it. As I pointed out in the first part of this article, most people start off by trying to cut down or otherwise manage their drinking. Although this strategy never works, it is the failure of those attempts that provides exactly the lesson some people need to help them move to the next step – the decision to give up alcohol altogether.
The idea that there might be something “off” with a person’s relationship to alcohol usually starts with an initial thought that his or her drinking needs to be reigned in a bit. By the time somebody starts thinking that way, or otherwise considering the possibility that his or her drinking has grown troublesome, it almost certainly has. This kind of thinking follows a process, because nobody goes from believing everything is fine one day to suddenly concluding that they have a major drinking problem the next.
This is really the opposite message of the fear-based legal marketers you have probably already encountered. For all the things that can be said about that approach (and make no mistake, lawyers use it because it does work to bring in clients), the fact is, reacting fearfully is not any kind of “intelligent” or proper way to handle a DUI case. Better outcomes are the result of experience and the application of careful and deliberate planning, rather than unfocused emotional reaction. Remember, success in a DUI case is always best measured by what does NOT happen to you.
Although I don’t want to focus too much on Sobriety Court, there is another facet to this worth mentioning before we move on – kind of the flip side of the coin, so to speak. While it is required that a person admits to needing some kind of help with his or her drinking in order to get into sobriety court, there are plenty of people who aren’t interested in anything like that or who otherwise maintain that they don’t have any problem and are merely seen by the system as being in denial.
This led us to explore the things that either will, or are very likely to happen to someone convicted of a 2nd or 3rd offense charge, including driver’s licenses sanctions, as well as the potential consequences to anyone who holds a professional license, or for whom a repeat offense DUI will have an adverse impact on his or her employment. I pointed out that, by operation of law, anyone convicted of a repeat offense DUI in Michigan is labeled a “habitual alcohol offender,” and is presumed to have an alcohol problem.
To be sure, the biggest and most obvious difference between a 1st offense DUI and 2nd and 3rd offense charges is the seriousness of the matters. While there is a veritable laundry list of potential legal penalties for all DUI cases, with plenty unique to 2nd and/or 3rd offense cases, an important part of our focus in this piece will be on the things that either will, or are very likely to actually happen. Beyond penalties, there is just something fundamentally problematic, in every sense of the word, about a repeat offense DUI that is entirely absent in a 1st offense case.
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.