I spent five years as a District Attorney.
And during that time, I prosecuted literally thousands
of DUI cases, and everything from simple misdemeanor,
run-of-the-mill DUIs, to DUIs with injuries, to vehicular
manslaughter cases, to actual murder cases, where someone
caused an accident, and somebody got killed, and we
charged them with murder.
So I've prosecuted thousands of these DUI cases.
Later, I resigned from the DA's office.
I became a criminal defense lawyer.
And now, I have a firm where we focus on representation of
citizens who are charged with DUI.
And I want to talk about a prosecutor's perspective,
because so much of what we do as DUI defense lawyers is
negotiating with District Attorneys, and city attorneys,
and trying to convince them to reduce charges, to dismiss
cases, to agree to lesser sentences, to get good deals
for our clients.
And if it doesn't work out, if we can't work out the deal
we're looking for, then the alternative, many times, is to
take the case to trial.
But if we can negotiate with the prosecutor and get a good
outcome that our client is happy with without the stress
of a trial, oftentimes, that's the best thing for our client.
Now, a prosecutor really looks at a DUI as
being a liability crime.
And that means that they're always worried about
recidivism.
They're always worried that this drunk driver is going to
go out and do it again, and that there's a responsibility
to hold him accountable this time.
And I remember in our training session, the first week at the
District Attorney's office, we had a speaker who was
a high level DA.
And he was talking about this.
And he said, you don't want a situation where you dismiss a
DUI case and a couple weeks later, the guy goes out, and
he gets drunk, and he gets back in his car, and he kills
somebody, and it's on the front page of the LA Times,
and the reporters come to you and say, why did you dismiss
his case a few weeks ago?
Why did you not hold him accountable the first time,
make him go to DUI school, make him do some jail time,
perhaps, make him face the consequences?
So that's always in the back of the mind of a prosecutor is
the liability that they might face personally, and judges
too, for that matter, that they might face personally if
they're too lenient on someone who's
charged with drunk driving.
Moreover, a lot of prosecutors are true believers.
And they really have a personal thing
against drunk driving.
And I remember my first assignment in the DA's office.
I had a supervisor who was like this.
And there was a big poster of Mothers Against Drunk Driving
in her office.
And she would go to lunch with victim advocacy groups, and
with people from MADD all the time.
And she hated drunk drivers.
And she felt like she was on this personal mission to get
them, and to hold them accountable, and to bring
justice, and to protect the safety of the community.
So there are a lot of prosecutors, and there are a
lot of judges like that, that they never want
to give a good deal.
They never want to give a break to a drunk driver
because of their own politics, and their own personal
philosophy.
But all of that said, at the end of the day, no matter what
their politics are, the prosecutor has got to prove
the case beyond a reasonable doubt in court.
And ultimately, that's going to be proving it to a jury.
And the prosecutor has to convince every one of those 12
jurors that the defendant is guilty.
And if even one of those jurors has a reasonable doubt,
and doesn't want to go along, then the
client can't be convicted.
So our job as defense lawyers is to find those problems in
the case that are going to give the prosecutor
misgivings.
And that may be problems with blood analysis.
That may be problems with the way the breath test was
administered.
That may be mistakes that the police officer makes in his
investigation.
That may be discrepancies between what the cop says in
his police report and what he testifies
to at the DMV hearing.
There are all sorts of issues that we find in a typical case
that really accrue to our clients favor.
The more we can find these problems in the case, and
document them, and bring them to the prosecutor and the
judge, and show them that there's weaknesses in the
case, and that a not guilty verdict is a definite
possibility if the case goes to trial, the more willing we
find prosecutors or judges to be to reduce charges, or agree
sometimes to an outright dismissal.