Preparing for a DWI Consultation

Question: How should I prepare for a consultation with a DWI attorney?

Answer:

If you’ve been charged in Texas with a DWI, for your initial meeting what I would like to have you do is bring in all your paperwork that you got in the arrest. There will be a paper that’s described as a DIC-24. You may have gotten some police report, and some preliminary matters. Bring all that in with you because I can review those and it gives me a starting point.

From you, I’m going to want to know whether the officer told you why he stopped you. If an officer stopped you for weaving within your lane, if he stopped you for speeding, those are good defensive reasons for a stop; they help you. If an officer said he stopped you for driving the wrong way, or he didn’t stop you because there was an accident, those are obviously things that will help the prosecution. What we need to do is we need to set in motion the DPS hearing. We need to get copies from the District Attorney’s office, police reports, lab reports, breath tests, and I also make an inquiry into the officer’s background as to what his training is. Very often, the officers that are making an arrest don’t have any training on the field sobriety test. If they don’t have any training on the field sobriety test, I usually find that they’re done incorrectly. There are three field sobriety tests that they’re going to do in every case. One is the nine-step walk-and-turn; there’s the 30 second lift-the-leg-count-out-loud; and there’s the HGN, where they ask you to follow the pen with your eyes. Sometimes clients come in and say, “I passed all the tests.” That’s good; that helps. That helps me know that the case may be defendable, and is probably defendable. However, most people get arrested based on the HGN, when an officer asks you to follow a pen with your eyes. Juries usually don’t buy that. It’s not visible on the video, and if that’s what the officer based the arrest on, then I usually feel the case is defendable. In Texas, if a case is defendable, most counties have started to offer alternatives to the DWI. If you go in with a defendable case and start fighting, arguing, and filing motions, they’ll offer you an alternative to a DWI. If a case is not defendable – and when I say not defendable, I mean that you are likely to lose at trial –you can still put up the fight and they may offer you an alternative to DWI. If they don’t you’ve got a choice to make; you set it for trial or you work out a plea bargain. What I usually do is sit down with the client and explain the pros and cons. Ultimately, it’s your choice.