Brown & Little, P.L.C. » Entries tagged with "impaired to the slightest"
Some (Un)Sound Advice
I often hear some really dumb things from prosecutors, but yesterday, I might have heard one of the dumbest things to date. It was in a DUI drug case where the prosecutor made a plea offer with no benefit to my client. I filed a number of motions, and yesterday was the motion hearing. From the beginning, my client has wanted to plead. He just doesn’t want to lose his license for a year, which is the case with DUI drugs, so we asked for him to plead to DUI for being impaired to the slightest degree, a different subsection with a 90-day license suspension attached. It’s a case where the supposed marijuana use was a day before driving. My client is young and has no … Read entire article »
Filed under: DUI, Prosecutors
Quit Enabling Them
I’m often disappointed with other defense lawyers, but I keep it to myself. Not this time. What I’ve been seeing over and over again in city and justice courts is just too embarrassing to tolerate. I’ve written before about prosecutors offering pleas that no defendant in his or her right mind should ever accept. I’ve also written before about Arizona’s DUI drug statute. I haven’t written about how defense lawyers are enabling and even encouraging prosecutors to offer worthless pleas to defendants in drug DUI cases. A plea should give a defendant some benefit. Otherwise, there’s little if any reason not to go to trial. Prosecutors seemed to know that before, as the standard offer for a first time drug DUI in many courts used to … Read entire article »
Filed under: DUI, Prosecutors
Too Good to Last
You may remember an old post about whether you can get a DUI in a car that doesn’t work. The issue came down to “actual physical control.” That’s because you don’t have to drive to get a DUI in Arizona; you just have to have actual physical control of a vehicle. When Arizona’s Court of Appeals, Division Two came out with a related opinion in State v. Zaragoza, I put up another post about actual control. I was pretty negative about whether the opinion would make a difference. It turns out I was right to be negative, but for the wrong reasons. This summer, the Supreme Court of Arizona vacated the opinion of the Court of Appeals. In Zaragoza, the defendant staggered to his car and got … Read entire article »
Filed under: Arizona Cases, DUI
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