12/09/2013
Here's a relevant article I wrote a while back about DUI. During the holidays (and all year through), remember how serious drunk driving is.
DUI - It's the Law
So a friend of yours calls you at 3 a.m. from his or her car after having been stopped by a police officer. The police officer tells your friend that he has been speeding and weaving and has taken his license, registration and insurance certificate to check the on-board State Police computer website. He says he has been drinking and asks you what he should do now.
The first thing you should tell him is that he should not say anything one way or the other to the police officer, but if he is asked to, he should cooperate with the police officer. If asked to take a field sobriety test, he should do so. More importantly, if the police officer asks him to take the Preliminary Breathalyzer Test (PBT), he MUST DO SO. Under Michigan law, if a police officer has a legitimate basis for requesting a driver to take a PBT, refusal to do so results in an automatic suspension of the driver’s license for four months. This is true whether or not the driver is legally intoxicated. The rationale of the law is that it is a privilege to be able to drive and one of the premises of granting that privilege is that drivers will cooperate with reasonable requests of police officers in their effort to keep Michigan roads safe from drunk drivers, those without insurance, and those with defective motor vehicles, etc.
Secondly, you should tell your friend that the Michigan laws dealing with driving under the influence of intoxicating beverages or drugs have been recently (January 2007) made stricter and harsher. MCL 257.625. Tell him he needs a good attorney to protect him even before he is released from jail. If his blood alcohol level exceeds the legal limit he probably will be held overnight in jail and arraigned the next morning. He can call from jail to obtain a lawyer. The dollar amount of the bond may be a function of a lawyer convincing the Judge that your friend is a good citizen, and there is no problem with him showing up in court when he is supposed to.
The blood alcohol threshold for the determination of whether someone is legally intoxicated has been lowed from 0.1 to .08. Moreover, the penalties at sentencing have been raised. For a first offense of OUIL – operating under the influence of liquor or UBAL - unlawful blood alcohol level – the court can levy of $200 to $1,000 fine up to one year in jail and up to 90 days of community service, and other court costs and oversight fees. The penalties are much more severe for subsequent convictions and a third conviction for OUIL is a felony and can frequently result in a prison sentence.
Further, the Secretary of State is required to either suspend or revoke the defendant’s license for six months or more. This action is taken based on the defendant’s conviction and driving record and will take place automatically. A restricted license for going to and from work and other required places is available.
Congress and the Michigan legislature have responded to the unfortunate fact that of the over 40,000 automobile accident deaths annually and hundreds of thousands of auto-related injuries, a very large percentage are attributable to driver alcohol and drug use. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), auto insurance companies, police organizations, governmental and non-profit substance abuse agencies have all beat the drum continuously and vehemently to punish drunk drivers as a deterrent to others.
Finally, once your friend has gotten home and dried out AND BEFORE HE GOES TO COURT THE FIRST TIME, you might want to talk to him about whether he has an alcohol problem. Whatever your friend was doing when he was stopped by the police, it was sufficiently out of the ordinary that it caught their attention. Regardless of what people may believe, the police are not waiting late at night to stop people who are driving just for the sake of having another traffic stop to fill a quota. It is precisely late at night that many drunk driving accidents take place because people have just left a bar or a party after a hard night of drinking and are both legally intoxicated and probably tired.
If the PBT test results, and the later alcohol and drug tests at the police station, show a blood alcohol or drug content above the legal limit, the real question confronting your friend and his attorney before they ever get to court is how to get him the best possible sentence at the end of the judicial process. Judges require if there is a conviction for driving under the influence of intoxicants – alcohol or drug – that the person have a pre-sentence evaluation by a probation officer. Part of that evaluation will be an alcohol assessment. If your friend in fact does have an alcohol problem, there is a very decent possibility that the probation officer, who has probably evaluated hundreds if not thousands of others, will be able to detect it regardless of any effort to deny or minimize it. Probation officers and judges want to know if a person who has an alcohol problem, acknowledges it.
Please make no mistake, your friend should get the best attorney he can and fight as hard as he can to defend himself. Your friend is clearly innocent until proven guilty and putting up a vigorous defense by an attorney can frequently lead to a good result for a client regardless of the facts of the case. Police and prosecutors make mistakes, have limited resources and cannot fight all the battles they want to fight. In the right circumstances taking a case to trial is absolutely the best thing to do. Moreover, prosecutors are usually very amenable to substantial plea reductions when dealing with an attorney who knows what he is doing.
However, also please make no mistake, you are not doing your friend any favor if you believe that he in fact has an alcohol or drug problem and you do not confront him about it. Sure, he might “beat” the case, he is calling you about but eventually, if he does not stop drinking and driving, he could get into a serious accident and seriously injure or even kill himself or another person.
A good attorney will counsel the client charged with drunk driving to seriously look at his situation. If convicted, a sentence requiring substance counseling or attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is almost a certainty. Starting such a course of action before being sentenced is frequently the best advice an attorney gives a drunk driving client because the Judge will look favorably on someone who recognizes his problem. This is especially true in jurisdictions which have a drug court and 19th District Court in Dearborn has one.
Accepting and getting control of an alcohol problem early is just as important as getting control of a medical problem like a diabetes or even cancer early. Yes, the laws against drunk driving are harsh and your friend needs to protect himself through good legal representation. However, the future consequences of your friend not being honest with himself if he in fact has an alcohol or drug problem, is potentially much harsher.
