Los Angeles DUI Attorney Blog

February 2, 2016

Dumb Things DUI Drivers Should Never Do

Want to get police officers to pay more attention to you? Try pulling one of these dumb stunts when you’re at risk for a DUI in Los Angeles.

A woman from Baraboo, Minnesota, apparently couldn’t find her own vehicle when she stumbled out of a BP gas station and convenience store in Juneau County. So she did the next best thing–she got into a waiting deputy’s vehicle and drove away.
The deputy and a state trooper dealt with the unnamed 29-year-old woman and her intoxicated male friend at the gas station around 4 a.m. in the morning. The woman apparently got tired of the discussion and left. Fortunately, witnesses saw her take off and pointed the trooper and the deputy–who were riding in the state police car–in the right direction. They soon caught up with her and managed to pull her over.

Turns out, this wasn’t the woman’s first DWI charge; she already had two on her record.

Bradley James Mitchell, on the other hand, didn’t try to flee the scene when officers stopped him on suspicion of DWI. But the 38-year-old from Weirsdale, Florida, should have tried a different excuse for swerving across two roads late in the evening of January 13th.

Mitchell told officers his low blood sugar caused his erratic driving. But medics called to the scene confirmed that his blood sugar was just fine. After Mitchell failed sobriety tests, officers searched his car and found methamphetamine and Clonazepam. He was also driving on a license suspended because of a previous DUI. Continue reading

January 27, 2016

Judge Refuses Pleas in DUI Cases

by Michael Kraut

Pity the poor judges who have to spend multiple hours in court each week hearing cases involving DUIs in Los Angeles. The stories they hear about deaths and destruction caused by people driving under the influence are often devastating.
One judge in Laramie County, Wyoming, has had enough. A recent article in the online Wyoming Tribune Eagle reported that Judge Steven Sharpe is taking a hard line when it comes to plea deals for drivers accused of DUI. When faced with a repeat offender, he now won’t accept a deal unless it includes some jail time for the driver.

In a case highlighted by the Tribune Eagle, Jeremy Shutt, now 28, had appeared before the judge last year on his fourth DUI charge in four years. Under Wyoming law, that would make Shutt’s latest arrest a felony, which meant incarceration time.
Shutt’s attorney had negotiated a plea deal with the county: five years of probation, with three to five years in prison if Shutt failed to live up to his end of the bargain (i.e. stay sober and stay out of trouble). But the judge, noting that Shutt had spent only a single day in jail on this latest charge, said that wasn’t enough. He’d keep Shutt out of state prison, but only if Shutt agreed to spend 120 days in jail.

January 25, 2016

Could You Lose Your Vehicle After A DUI?

by Michael Kraut

Suppose you lent your vehicle to a relative who had a problem with a Los Angeles DUI in the past. You thought that your relative had sorted out all the legal issues, but when police pull her over for a traffic violation, they charge her with driving on a suspended license.

That’s bad enough—but then you find that the state is going to seize your vehicle because of your relative’s misbehavior!

A woman in Moline, Illinois, is living that scenario. Last summer, 70-year-old Judy Wiese gave her grandson the keys to her 2009 Jeep Compass because he said he needed it to get to work. The young man told his grandmother that he had taken care of all his court obligations related to a 2014 DUI. He neglected to mention that didn’t include getting his license back.

January 20, 2016

DO Some Los Angeles DUI Offenders Get Preferential Treatment?

by Michael Kraut

Some celebrities arrested for a DUI in Los Angeles appears to get off with a very light punishment. Although justice is supposed to be blind, the truth is that people with money and/or connections frequently do get a better deal.

Take the case of the Texas teen whose defense for killing four people in a DUI accident was that he had “affluenza.” The attorney for Ethan Crouch, who had a blood alcohol content of .24 when arrested, claimed that his client had never learned to take responsibility because his parents’ wealth had shielded him from the consequences of his actions. Crouch received a controversially light sentence of 10 years of probation and treatment in a residential, in-patient treatment facility. (Apparently hisaffluenza hasn’t been cured; he fled to Mexico, and he is currently fighting extradition back to the U.S.)

Contrast that to the sentence imposed on a 23-year-old Texas man of moderate means who killed four people in a DUI accident at the South by Southwest Festival in 2014. Rashad Owens, who had a .114 BAC reading at the time of his arrest, received a sentence of life in prison. (There were a few aggravating factors, however: Owens was driving a stolen car at the time and fleeing from police.)

January 18, 2016

Wow – Verdicts Overturned in 30-Year Old DUI Cases

by Michael Kraut

If a judge had accepted your guilty plea case involving a Los Angeles DUI, and new evidence turned up, would you take the time and spend the money to have that verdict overturned? What if your conviction dated all the way back to 1986? Some people in Massachusetts who pleaded guilty to DUI are willing to do it.

District Court in session. Edgartown.

A recent article in the Vineyard Gazette (the newspaper for the upscale Martha’s Vineyard) reported that attorneys who practice in the Edgartown District Court are taking a look at the operating under the influence (OUI) cases handled by Judge Brian Rowe over his 20 years in office. When accepting an accused DUI driver’s guilty plea, Judge Rowe apparently neglected to follow a procedure called colloquy. According to the Gazette, the judge was supposed to advise the guilty party that he/she had the right to a jury trial if desired and to ask each defendant if he or she fully understood the consequences of the decision to make a guilty plea. There’s a box on some court forms that the judge should have checked if the discussion had taken place.

January 15, 2016

Courts Rule For and Against Accused in Two DUI Cases

by Michael Kraut

The results of court cases in other states may not directly impact the outcome of Los Angeles DUI arrests, but they sometimes indicate the direction in which the judicial wind is blowing across the U.S.

The State of Georgia has already made it harder for prosecutors to win DUI convictions because of a ruling that people suspected of DUI may be too intoxicated to give their true informed consent to a breathalyzer test. Now an administrative law judge has thrown out the state’s attempt to suspend the license of a driver accused of DUI.

Atlanta Police Officer Justin J. Brodnik pulled David Leoni over for exceeding the speed limit by 20 miles per hour. The officer smelled alcohol on Leoni’s breath and noticed that his eyes were watery. (Leoni said he had just woken up from a nap.)

Despite the fact that Leoni answered questions without any difficulty and didn’t have trouble passing a balance test, Brodnik arrested him for DUI. That meant the Department of Driver Services automatically suspended his license. The law judge ruled that the watery eyes and a moderate smell of alcohol weren’t enough to prove that Leoni was impaired, so he ordered the state to restore Leoni’s license.

January 13, 2016

Dumb Decisions By DUI Drivers to Start Off 2016

by Michael Kraut

Sometimes people who’ve had a few too many seem to go out of their way to make poor choices. Take the case of Juan Pablo Garcia, a 22-year-old Uber driver arrested for a DUI in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day.

As a Uber driver, Garcia didn’t have to pick up passengers, but he decided to respond to a 1 a.m. call from 19-year-old Arlene Mendez, who was looking for a ride. According to CBS Local Los Angeles, Mendez later related that she felt uncomfortable with Garcia’s driving almost from the start. Her fears increased when she peered over the back seat and saw that Garcia was hitting 80 miles per hour on city streets. Garcia ignored her pleas to slow down and ended up slamming into another vehicle, overturning his own car in the process. Fortunately, Mendez wasn’t seriously hurt.

January 11, 2016

New Year’s Eve DUI Accident Injures DC Pedestrians

by Michael Kraut

Last November, a man eventually charged with DUI in Los Angeles killed two people and injured several others when his car hit a minivan and then swerved onto a sidewalk. A similar accident—fortunately non-fatal so far—occurred in the District of Columbia on New Year’s Day.

Twenty-five year old Malik Lloyd was apparently trying to turn from northbound 17th Street onto L Street in the early morning hours of January 1. Lloyd’s depth perception must have been off, however, because instead of making the corner he ended up skidding his car across the road, jumping the sidewalk and crashing into a floral planter and utility pole. His car continued down the sidewalk for several more feet, hitting seven people who were standing outside the “Bar Code” nightclub. Emergency crews took the victims to the hospital. Most were released, suffering only minor injuries, but one, the bar’s bouncer, was in critical condition the next day.

January 6, 2016

Minnesota Court Rules Warrants Required For DUI Urine Tests

by Michael Kraut

Under California law, police officers arresting a driver for a Los Angeles DUI don’t use a urine test for determining blood alcohol content at the time of an arrest. AB 2020, which became effective in January 2013, requires law enforcement officials to employ the more accurate blood test. The idea behind the law is that relying on the more reliable blood test will prevent DUI defendants from contesting the charges against them (if they’re based on a urine test).

But Minnesota still permits urine tests for DUI—and it just got a little harder for police officers to get that type of evidence when they suspect a driver of DUI. According to the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled on December 28th that a state law that makes it a crime for a driver to refuse a urine test without a warrant is unconstitutional. This court said that making it a crime to refuse a blood or urine test in a DUI case implicates a defendant’s fundamental right to be free from unconstitutional searches. The court reversed the conviction of a driver found guilty of refusing to submit to a blood or urine test.

January 4, 2016

Three Wildest DUI Stories from This Decade [So Far]

by Michael Kraut

When it comes to stories about driving under the influence in Los Angeles (and elsewhere), strange arrests and odd situations seem to take center stage. Some of the stories are so unbelievable that you have to wonder whether they are just urban legends. Here are three of the decade’s wildest, jaw-dropping DUI stories:

1. Crocs brand founder arrested in 2012. George Boedecker, the 51-year-old Crocs shoe brand founder, apparently was so intoxicated when police pulled him over that he tried to convince officers that he was dating Taylor Swift. The story gets even crazier; he gave cops obscenity-laced excuses until they decided to arrest him on DUI charges.

2. Wisconsin man didn’t see repeat offenses as a crime. A 53-year-old from Wisconsin, Daniel Frisch, has a history of DUI. He and about 30 other people in the state have a whopping total of more than 30 DUI convictions apiece. Frisch never killed anyone during his intoxicated excursions, but time in prison may not have changed his outlook much. According to reports, he never viewed himself as an alcoholic and never thought about his drinking and driving as a crime. He does admit, however, that his numerous convictions have taken away his chance at living a normal life.