Simply hiring an attorney does not guarantee that you’ll get off or that the case will be dismissed; that’s something of a misnomer to think that hiring the best attorney will get the case dismissed; it’s just not true. You hire an attorney for their experience to review police reports and to find and deal with any good legal or factual issues in the case that another attorney might miss, to make sure there was a reasonable suspicion to stop the vehicle and to launch into a DUI investigation, probable cause to arrest, to make sure that the person’s constitutional rights were not violated, to make sure that there were no issues with the breath testing or the blood testing and to see if there are any good legal or factual issues that can help negotiate the case down to a different type of offense, maybe getting an extreme DUI down to a DUI or a DUI down to a reckless driving or even get the case dismissed.
You hire an attorney to be there to be there to answer your questions and hold your hand through this difficult process; when my clients hire me, they get a lot of extra benefits that many attorneys just don’t offer. My clients have my personal cellphone number, they can call or text me or email any questions that they might have; I also take care of the Motor Vehicle Division aspect of their case, I review the police reports and I have a former police officer review them, as well, to find police policy violations and I include retesting the blood for alcohol content if I think it’s in their best interest.
When all is said and done, if there is a DUI conviction, I include filing a motion to set aside the conviction. What I offer my clients goes beyond what pretty much every other attorney in the state offers and, especially, at the prices that I charge, they get a tremendous value for their money. I show my client what I have saved them, and it’s often thousands of dollars.
What Might Happen If I Didn’t Hire A Good Attorney For My Out-of-state DUI Case?
You want to hire the right attorney. An excellent resource that I recommend to anyone in-state or out-of-state is a website called AVVO.com, which allows you to research attorneys to find the right one. There are a lot of attorneys who claim to be DUI lawyers, but when you really do your research, you find out they’re really any type of lawyer you want them to be, as long as you have the money. Having the right attorney can make all the difference; the case I had a few weeks ago with clients with a prior DUI out of New Hampshire, is a really good example; probably 90 percent of DUI attorneys would have simply noted that they had a prior in New Hampshire and they would have to deal with it. You need to find the right one; the one who knows to look at the evidence and be willing to fight and say that is not a prior because doesn’t translate to Arizona law.
In that client’s case, it was the difference between a four-month jail sentence and a two-day jail sentence in a plea deal, and possibly more, since that client was dealing with a super extreme DUI and the prosecutor was alleging a prior, which carries a minimum sentence of six months in jail. However, I was able to work everything out with the prosecutor and get a jail sentence of two days for a first-time extreme DUI rather than a super extreme DUI.
How Do I Know If My Attorney Can Handle An Out-of-state DUI Case?
I can handle it. As far as researching goes, it might be tough; if you plan to consult with some attorneys, bring up the fact that you have a prior DUI conviction from a different state and see how they react. If they say, “We’ll have to deal with that or the prosecutor will give us paperwork and if they can prove that you have a prior, then we’re going to have to deal with it as a second-time offense here in Arizona,” that kind of indicates that they don’t necessarily know what they are doing.
What someone who knows how to handle things should say is, “We will see if the prosecutor can disclose if they know about a prior conviction from that state, if they can disclose the paperwork and then we do research to find out if that out-of-state prior DUI conviction translates to an Arizona DUI conviction.” You can get a sense of whether the attorney knows what to do in handling an out-of-state prior or if they will simply take the default position that, “It probably can be used as a prior DUI conviction here, so let’s just assume that it is a prior DUI making this one a second-time offense”.
For more information on How An Attorney Can Help A DUI Charge, a free initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you’re seeking by calling 480-900-0384 today.
