Posts Tagged ‘Florida DUI attorney in Florida’

Administrative License Suspension in Florida

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Florida drivers pulled over for suspected DUI are faced with a Catch-22. You may be asked to perform field sobriety tests and a preliminary breath test at the scene, which you may refuse.  However, you will be taken to the station or a medical center and given a second test.  While you can again choose to refuse (except for narrow circumstances involving accidents with injury), Florida’s implied consent law means that your refusal will have significant adverse consequences.  The state will summarily suspend your license for a year the first time you refuse and for 18 months for each refusal after the first. These suspensions are in place even if you are found innocent of any DUI charges.  If you do consent and have a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of .08 or greater, however, you will have your license suspended for a minimum of 180 days.  Our experienced Florida criminal defense lawyers have helped people just like you protect their driver’s license and stay out of jail.

The Florida Uniform Traffic Citation, the yellow ticket you were given at the time of your DUI arrest, counts as a temporary license.  Your Florida driver’s license will be taken at the time of a DUI arrest, but the ticket will function as a temporary license for 10 days.  This permit allows you to drive for employment or business.  Generally, it is permissible to drive to work, your attorney’s office, the store, court or the like, but discretionary trips, which are merely for leisure purposes, are not permitted.  During this narrow 10 day window, it is imperative that you file an application for a Formal Review Hearing with the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV).

This administrative hearing permits you to challenge your license suspension’s legality and seek reinstatement of your driving privileges.  Unless you have other legal or administrative issues with your license besides the DUI suspension, the DHSMV will extend your work-only license an additional 42 days and schedule a hearing for some time in the coming 30 days.  If you do not file for a hearing, you will be unable to drive for at least the first 30 days of the administrative suspension.  You may enroll in an approved alcohol abuse education program and apply for another temporary work license.  A refusal to submit to a formal chemical test means that you must wait 90 days before applying for a work-only license.  Subsequent refusals make you ineligible for a temporary work license.

Before the administrative hearing, you (or your attorney, ideally) should prepare a statement and subpoena any witnesses you need, including the police officer.  The administrative hearing can be used to challenge whether the officer had probable cause to stop you and whether or not you were over the legal limit unless you refused the test.  If you refused, the main issue will be whether the police officer informed you of the consequences of a refusal on your driving privileges.  It is virtually impossible to prevail at the administrative hearing without an experienced Florida DUI defense attorney.  An experienced DUI defense lawyer will carefully investigate the circumstances of your case so that he or she can protect your license.  The attorney will also use the hearing to begin developing a defense strategy to your DUI case.

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Emerging DUI Liability for Passengers: Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

A person is out drinking and decides to allow someone else drive home.  This is a good decision that makes the driver and others on the road safer because it means the driver does not drink and drive.  This is exactly what we want to encourage drivers to do and should protect a driver from the risk of a DUI arrest … well maybe not.  An alarming DUI case out of Japan may foreshadow where aggressive legal campaigns against drunk driving may be headed in the U.S.  Two passengers who had accepted a ride with a driver who had been drinking and was involved in a fatal accident were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison.  This case has already caught the eye of a number of drunk driving activist groups who see it as a way to force passengers to take affirmative steps to keep drivers they know have had too much to drink off the road.

The judge in the Japanese case reasoned that when the two passengers accepted a ride with the intoxicated driver they encouraged the driver to drink and drive.  This encouragement was treated as “aiding and abetting” the crime of driving under the influence.  While dram shop laws exist in may states that permit civil liability to be imposed on a social host or business (i.e. bar or restaurant) that serves alcohol to an obviously intoxicated person who causes injury in a drunk driving accident, the decision by the Japan court goes much further.  It imposes criminal liability, which is why the passengers received a prison sentence.

The court also seems to have stretched the law in terms of “aiding and abetting” a DUI offense.  The passengers did not actually encourage or persuade the driver to drive but merely accepted a ride from a person who already made a decision to drive.  This is a frightening development because it could pave the way to imposing criminal liability on others who drink and drive where the person charged had no role in the driver becoming intoxicated nor his or her decision to drive.  Criminal liability in the U.S. usually is not imposed for mere inaction where the risk of injury to another was not in some way created or set in motion by the person charged.

While no state including Florida imposes liability on passengers whose only alleged criminal act is to accept a ride with a driver who has been drinking, MADD and other drunk driving groups are already touting this decision as a guide for future drunk driving laws in the U.S.  The sad reality is that this type of law punishes people for doing exactly what they should do, specifically not getting behind the wheel of a car if they have been drinking.  One has to wonder how a law like this would work given that even experienced police officers cannot tell for sure if someone is over the legal limit so it is unclear how the average passenger in a vehicle can be asked to make this determination.  If you or someone you love has been arrested and charged with drunk driving, our experienced Florida DUI lawyers will carefully investigate your case to develop the strongest possible DUI defense.

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