los angeles DUI

Published on: May 4, 2016

Arizona Supreme Court Rules: One Word Wrong–No DUI Charge

When police officers charge drivers with Los Angeles DUI, they must take great care when booking people to avoid violating their Fourth Amendment rights. Even simple, seemingly trivial mistakes in protocol can mean that an otherwise justified arrest won’t stand up in court.

To that end, the Arizona Supreme Court recently ruled that if police officers say that a driver is “required” to take a blood alcohol test rather than “requested” to do so, the DUI charge won’t stand. According to Tucson TV station KVOA, the court said that requiring a search would violate a person’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search.

Published on: May 2, 2016

High on Aerosol Dust Clean? No DUI Charges with Synthetic Drugs

by Michael Kraut

Synthetic drugs are causing a real dilemma for states striving to enforce laws against driving under the influence. Depending on the type of drug a driver uses to get high, prosecutors can find it next to impossible to obtain a DUI conviction. Is that fair? How can states standardize how they handle and punish drug DUI cases? What safeguards should be in place to protect defendants?

An Associate Press article recently analyzed the case of 18-year-old Kristian Roggio, who suffered fatal injuries when another driver crossed a road in Brooklyn and collided with her car. Police maintain that the offending driver got high after inhaling aerosol dust cleaner, and they charged him with vehicular manslaughter. However, the New York Supreme Court threw out those charges, because that particular substance didn’t appear on the state’s list of banned substances. The Court decided that case nine years ago, but problems regarding how to identify and prosecute drug DUIs in New York and beyond persist to this day.

Published on: April 25, 2016

Repeat DUI Drivers Lose Loophole In Oklahoma

by Michael Kraut

When courts find someone guilty of a DUI in Los Angles, the penalties that person faces will depend on whether or not he or she has prior DUI convictions. (It doesn’t matter if some of the DUI convictions occurred in another state; California treats those offenses as if they occurred in state.)

Most states also track DUIs that take place in different jurisdictions within their boundaries. But Oklahoma has provided an out for drivers convicted of DUI in most municipalities. Only two municipal courts in that state are courts of record, which report DUI convictions to the Oklahoma Supreme Court Network. That leaves 350 municipal courts that don’t report to the state. Drivers can rack up an unlimited number of DUIs, and as long as they took place in different municipalities, each would count as a first offense.

Published on: April 16, 2016

Georgia Lawmaker Causes Stir With DUI Arrest

by Michael Kraut

With dash cams and body cams becoming the norm for police departments everywhere, people charged with DUI in Los Angeles may now find a video of their arrest posed online. The results can be embarrassing—just ask Georgia State Representative, Tom Taylor.

On the afternoon of April 7th, police in the city of Clayton, Georgia, stopped Taylor for going 72 mph in a 45 mph zone. The officer said Taylor had red eyes and smelled of alcohol, which the legislator said was due to the fact that he had been drinking the night before. The officer didn’t buy that excuse, however, and turned up a water bottle in the vehicle that smelled of alcohol. Police asked Taylor to take a field sobriety test, but Taylor didn’t comply.
The officers arrested Taylor, and, using a breathalyzer, measured his BAC at .225—almost three times the legal limit.

Published on: March 7, 2016

Suspects Not Driving Charged With DUI

by Michael Kraut

While the typical DUI in Los Angeles involves police actually seeing someone driving their vehicle, that’s not always the case. Officers sometimes make arrests when they haven’t seen the car moving, but have good reason to surmise that the driver was DUI.

KEYE TV in Austin, Texas, reported that John Thomas Watts, 26, was trying to change his tire in a Pizza Hut parking lot when police arrested him for driving while intoxicated. Watts told officers that he had hit the curb and needed to change his tire. But Watts was finding the task difficult – not surprising when he couldn’t stand up without falling over and when he was trying to insert the jack handle into the wrong hole. Police officers also found nine empty beer cans in Watts’ front seat, earning him a trip to the booking station.

An officer in another Texas town, College Station, found Connor James Bond naked in the front seat of his vehicle with his clothes on the seat beside him. Bond’s vehicle wasn’t moving when police spotted him, but it was situated on the railroad tracks, where he had apparently stopped after driving off the road. There were two more indications that Bond might be intoxicated. One was that while the police officer was talking to him, Bond tried to start the car with scissors. The other was the half-empty bottle of Everclear liquor they allegedly found in the back seat of the vehicle.

Published on: February 19, 2016

Tennessee Court Tells DUI Drivers They Can’t Cross Any Lines

by Michael Kraut

Can a police officer pull drivers over—and subsequently charge them with DUI—just because their vehicles crossed the center line? A Tennessee court has said yes. While it won’t affect anyone contesting a DUI in Los Angeles, the court’s ruling in the Volunteer State seems to be bucking a national trend that has made it harder for prosecutors to get DUI convictions.

In a ruling that combined two different cases, State v. Linzey Danielle Smith and State v. William Whitlow Davis, Jr., the Tennessee Supreme Court found that police officers were acting within the law when they stopped the defendants for traffic violations in two separate incidents. The defendants, whom police charged with DUI, had argued that the officers had violated their constitutional rights prohibiting unlawful seizure because they did not have probable cause to make the stop.

Published on: February 8, 2016

Update: “Affluenza” DUI Driver Could Remain On Probation

by Michael Kraut

Judges will often waive jail time and place drivers on probation when they’re charged with a first-offense DUI in Los Angeles. But some people don’t appreciate that kind of leniency; they take advantage of it. What’s worse, the ingrates often don’t receive any punishment.

Ethan Couch of Tarrant County, Texas, made international headlines after his attorneys claimed that he was suffering from “affluenza” when he killed four people in a horrific DUI accident in 2013. (According to the lawyer, Couch wasn’t to blame because his family’s money had shielded him from the consequences of other bad behavior.)

Published on: January 27, 2016

New Year Starts With Unusual DUI Arrests

by Michael Kraut

While city police officers were tackling the typical arrests for DUI in Los Angeles, law enforcement officers in other states were coping with some more atypical incidents.

In Tucson, Arizona, a woman who gained national fame for wearing a colander on her head in her driver’s license picture is getting a bit more (probably unwanted) attention. According to the Arizona Daily Star website, Jessica “Asia” Steinhauser had traveled by car to the offices of her local school district with her 10-year-old daughter in the vehicle. It didn’t take the district staff long to figure out there was a problem; Steinhauser smelled like alcohol and passed out on the office sofa shortly after her arrival. Police arrived at the scene and arrested her.

Published on: January 25, 2016

Police Search for Missing DUI Drivers

by Michael Kraut

Drivers who have neglected to show up in court for a hearing on a Los Angeles DUI charge may find the police knocking at their doors. With the help of some funding from the federal government, several jurisdictions in California are rounding up people who have outstanding warrants for DUI-related cases.

Last December, police officers in Petaluma did a DUI warrant sweep. They attempted to contact 49 people arrested for DUI who hadn’t appeared on their court date or who had not complied with the terms of their sentence or paid the fines they owed for DUI.
By the time police ended their work for the evening, they had made five arrests; four people with warrants for failure to appear and one with an outstanding warrant for driving on a suspended license. While the courts gave most new appearance dates, police took one woman into custody, where she remains held without bail.

Published on: January 22, 2016

One Word Jeopardizes Missouri DUI Convictions

by Michael Kraut

Small words can have a big impact. Just ask the thousands of drivers in Missouri who could see their DUI convictions thrown out of court thanks to the substitution of “or” for “and” in the instructions for Breathalyzer calibration. If a judge made a similar ruling regarding DUIs in Los Angeles, lawyers could submit dozens of requests to have their clients’ convictions overturned.

The ruling stems from an incident on July 12, 2013, when Lake Saint Louis, Missouri, police arrested Kristin Nicole Stiers for driving while intoxicated. When Stier’s attorney, Matt Fry, began looking into the results of the breathalyzer test—which registered her blood alcohol content as above the legal limit—he found that the state agency responsible for the calibration directions had made a mistake in its directions to state police.