Michigan Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

In the previous article, I talked about getting through a DUI. In this installment, I want to focus more on just plain getting out of it. It goes without saying that everyone arrested for a OWI would love to have the whole thing to just go away. As a Michigan DUI lawyer, the primary thought in my mind, as I meet with a new DUI client and listen to what happened is, where do we find a way to get out of it? This isn’t just about wishful thinking, but rather assuming a mindset directed to winning. I often say that success in a DUI case is best judged by what does NOT happen to you, so if the entire case can be dismissed and nothing happens to you, what could be better? As great as that sounds, however, success is almost never an accident. Thus, a DUI lawyer has to set out with the determination to actually find a way to beat this thing, rather than merely hoping there is some way to do that.

For the most part, when DUI charges are dismissed, it’s because of problems with the evidence. There are specific protocols for how evidence must be obtained and tested in drinking and driving cases, and sometimes, if those protocols aren’t properly followed, that evidence can be kept out of court. Evidence needs to meet certain minimum standards in order to be considered reliable enough to use against a person. In the context of DUI charges, anytime a case can be dismissed because of problems with the evidence or questions about its reliability, that’s a win, and we’ll take it.

In the real world, there are 3 areas where we’re most likely to find problems with evidence significant enough to have it kept out of court: the traffic stop, the field sobriety tests, and the chemical evidence (meaning the breath or blood tests). While there can be problems with just about any part of a DUI case, these 3 stages present the most fertile ground for successful evidentiary challenges. Chances are, if there is a basis to challenge the evidence in a given case, it will have occurred during one of these 3 phases.

As a Michigan DUI lawyer, there are tons of factual and legal issues that I must consider when handling an OWI case. That’s my job. Most of what you’ll find written on the internet focuses on things like evidence, including field sobriety tests and BAC scores, along with how cases work out and how and why plea bargains matter. Those are all important things, but they fail to look at how things feel, and are perceived, from the client’s point of view. Seriously, once you’ve hired a DUI lawyer, you should feel some relief, and all that legal stuff should become his or her problem. In exchange for what you’ve paid, you should have the comfort and confidence of knowing that your case will be taken care of in the most beneficial way for you. As the person facing the charge, your stress level should go down because you genuinely understand that you’re going to get through this, and that everything will be okay.

And it will. If it’s your first DUI, and even if you are charged with a high BAC offense, we can navigate around most, if not all of, the scary sounding penalties, including jail. Really, with only 1 possible exception in one Oakland County court, no one goes to jail in a 1st offense DUI case. While a 2nd offense DUI is pretty much a bucket of suck, it’s not the end of the world, either, and with any kind of good legal work, you can emerge unscathed, and often enough without any real chance of going to jail. In fact, unless you’ve racked up a bunch of prior OWI convictions, even if you’re looking at a 3rd offense DUI, you’re not going to go to prison (at least not here, in the Metro-Detroit, Tri-County area). In other words, no matter how bad things are or seem, you’ll get through this. Of course, the better your lawyer, the better things will be for you. After all, that’s exactly what you are (or at least should be) paying for. Whatever your situation, though, it always helps to realize that, down the road, in about a year or so, this whole mess will be behind you.

Ultimately, it’s not about whether you’ll survive a DUI – of course you will – it’s about getting through it with the least amount of consequences. I am a busy DUI lawyer, and my team and I handle a lot of cases. As far as experience goes, we are certainly in the “seen it all” category, and probably 10 times over, at that. Accordingly, I can honestly say that the worst punishment most people get in their DUI cases is self-imposed emotional stress, especially in 1st and 2nd offense cases. Some people just freak themselves out over a DUI way beyond what’s necessary. I hope the reader really takes the time to digest what I’m saying here, because the majority of DUI lawyers rely rather heavily on fear-based marketing tactics, even if they do so unintentionally.

The whole world of DUI cases can seem like an alphabet soup full of letters and abbreviations. As I pointed out in a recent article, Michigan doesn’t even have a “DUI” law; instead, we have OWI, which stands for “Operating While Intoxicated.” The OWI law came into effect in 2003, replacing the old law, which previously defined drunk driving as OUIL, or Operation Under the Influence of Liquor. In this article, I want to examine 4 different sets of 3 very important initials (FST, BAC, PSI and SOS) that affect every drinking and driving case that goes through the court system. Although the various drunk driving offenses are officially identified with some variation of the term “OWI,” I will mostly use the term DUI simply because that’s the way most people talk.

The first 3-letter term a driver will encounter is FST, meaning field sobriety tests. These are the things you do at the side of the road, after being pulled over, and can include things like the heel-to-toe walk, standing leg raise, and the horizontal gaze nystagmus (HGN) test. Beyond these more “approved tests,” police officers also often ask people to count backwards from one specific number to another, recite the alphabet without singing, and/or tilt their head back and touch their nose. Field sobriety tests are named after the purpose they serve, allowing an officer in the field to determine if there is probable cause to believe a driver is intoxicated.

There is, of course, a large body of law and lots of science behind FST’s and that goes way beyond the scope of this article, but you can be sure that the police will almost always write in their report that the person failed one or more of them as justification for the decision to arrest him or her. Back in the day, before video, it was more or less the driver’s word versus the officer’s word when it came to how well or not a person did. Now, most police cars are equipped with dash-cam video recorders, so we can usually compare the officers account of how a person did on the FST’s with the video of how he or she actually performed. In my role as a Michigan DUI lawyer, I always look for, and do, in fact, find things on the video that help my client get out of his or her DUI charge. Even when the person didn’t do very well and video only serves to confirms the officer’s account that the person was intoxicated, having watched it gives both me and the client the piece of mind to know that we’re not missing anything we could successfully challenge to get the case thrown out.

In the previous article about examining the evidence in a Michigan DUI case, I noted that just about everyone knows that the police report is important. I even pointed out that, once in a while, a proactive DUI client will show up for his or her appointment having already obtained that report (I also explained that doing so is not necessary because that’s one of the very first things we’ll get). In this article, I want to look at both the significance of the police report and also examine its main shortcoming. At best, a police report is the honest recollection of the officer who wrote it, but those recollections are, by definition, subjective, and can only be from the officer’s perspective. At worst, a police report can be a lot of exaggeration and BS. Often enough, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

In the old days, the police report was the pretty much “it,” in terms of evidence leading up to a DUI arrest. Now, we live in the video age. Most police cars today are equipped with dash cams, and it is standard practice in my office to obtain those video recordings in DUI cases. It wasn’t that long ago when almost no police cars had them, and the only real “evidence” of what took place during a DUI traffic stop was, as I noted above, the police officer’s written account of it. With video available for comparison, an officer in a car equipped with a dash-cam must always be mindful of that. Even so, it is not rare, by any stretch, to to read something in the police report that plays out differently on the video, or to see something on the video (like the rough treatment of someone arrested) that was not mentioned in the report.

Thus, we must begin with a clear understanding that the police report is not, and can never be, a completely objective record of what really took place during a DUI stop. This is not anyone’s fault, it’s just an indisputable fact that someone involved in a situation has a fixed perspective and therefore a subjective take on what happened. We all have a built-in bias simply because we’re human. Also, the ability to essentially create the story has a lot of value, as well. After a DUI arrest, when an officer goes back to write his or her report, do you think he or she would ever write anything in there about messing up, forgetting something, or pulling someone over based on a “hunch” that didn’t have any objective basis?

In Michigan, the correct name for what we commonly call a DUI is actually OWI, meaning “Operating While Intoxicated.” At their core, DUI cases are based on evidence. Michigan does have robust OWI laws, and an ever-growing body of case law interpreting them as well as how evidence should be obtained and analyzed. It goes without saying that when hiring a lawyer for a DUI case, you expect that he or she will be up to date on all the relevant laws and cases. Handling drinking and driving cases is something of a specialized practiced area, and keeping current on all the law and case rulings actually does take more time than most lawyer have, expect for those, like me, who essentially concentrate in this field.

Beyond staying on top of the law in books and cases, though, my job, as a Michigan DUI lawyer (and the job of every lawyer, really, who takes on an OWI case) is to gather and carefully examine all the evidence. Important here is that ALL of the evidence must be examined. This includes everything, including how much a person drank, where, and when, to how he or she got pulled over or had the first police contact, what happened then (including his or her performance on any field sobriety tests), how the arrest took place, when and how a breath or blood test was taken, how it was analyzed, and ultimately, how those test results were calculated. This must be done carefully, and it must be done critically, meaning the lawyer needs to look for any flaws or problems with the evidence. In this article, I want to focus on getting and examining the evidence in a DUI case.

Everyone in the world knows that the police report is important, but it is only 1 piece, of many pieces, of the evidence in an OWI case. Over the course of my 27-plus years as a lawyer, I’ve had plenty of clients who already obtained a copy of their police report before ever coming to my office. That’s actually not necessary, because we’ll get it ourselves, but the point I’m driving at is that absolutely everybody understands the foundational role of the police report. Every lawyer, in every case, should get the police report, but that’s such a basic first step, it’s kind of like pointing out that you have to start a car before you can drive it. In other words, it’s a given. The police report can be a goldmine of information – or not. However accurate it is or isn’t, the police report is nothing more than the police side of what happened, told from the perspective of the officer who wrote it.