Representative Cases DUI

Several years ago a middle aged business man had been stopped, arrested and charged with Driving Under the Influence - DUI.  It was important for his professional career to be able to drive and keep his license.

We agreed to take his Department of Motor Vehicle case and start our investigation.  It seems that while there wasn’t any real bad driving, the client had agreed to submit to a breath test for the presence of alcohol, which he failed.  Those test results were the best evidence against him and we wanted to be sure that they were valid.  We started to check out everything we could think of to see if there was any problems with the test or testing procedure.  We got a re-test, we got the intoxilyzer repair records, we got the police laboratory certification to operate a laboratory, we got the previous two months of tests and we interviewed the officer.  Nothing seemed to suggest that anything was wrong with the intoxilyzer or the officer’s procedure, but then we asked for the officer’s certification card as proof that he was a certified operator of the intoxilyzer.  He wouldn’t give it to us.  That made us very suspicious.

So we filed a motion with the court to compel the production of his testing certificate or in the alternative, to dismiss the case.  It was only then that the officer produced his testing certificate showing that he was properly certified on the day of the test.

We thought we hit a dead end, but then, we got curious about the officer’s reluctance to turn over proof of his certification and it started us to think that something might be wrong, so we next requested the certificate of his instructor’s certificate.  Low and behold it turned out after another motion to the court that the instructor had never been certified to be an instructor and that he just woke up one day and started calling himself an instructor.

Needless to say, neither the district attorney, nor the court were pleased and the charges were dropped. The client remains very pleased to this day.