Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

Grace and Mercy in Texas DWI Law

Texas allows certain persons arrested for a DWI, and even some who suffer DWI conviction, to obtain a court order sealing and destroying all associated records. A DWI expunction, or expungement, means that the defendant has the legal right to deny any such DWI event.

So far, so good. A DWI expunction can restore job, career, and reputation to those whom the Texas legislature decided deserve a second chance. Read the details about DWI expunction here. The expunction opportunity is appropriately limited to deserving defendants, but it is a wise and beneficial act of Texas-law mercy and grace.

Trouble in River City

The only problem is that a story arose not too long ago of a Texas district attorney moving to reverse the DWI expunction of a prominent Texas attorney. Anyone who has obtained or wishes to obtain an expunction must be wondering, Can they do that?!

Details of the story are murky. The story reports as fact that the prominent attorney who suffered the DWI arrest obtained the DWI arrest's expunction less than a year later, on the signature of the local district attorney. That signature, the DWI charge's dismissal, and the expunction may have been highly irregular or not at all irregular, depending on whom you ask. But the story reports that the involved county's new district attorney did move to reopen the prominent attorney's DWI case, which if successful, would have effectively reversed the expunction.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

A late 2020 media report calls to our attention a Houston Forensic Science Center study, abstract here, revealing concerning patterns in Houston-area DWI arrests. A review of thousands of area DWI blood tests from 2014 to 2018 shows significant increases in drugged driving, together with marked changes in the drugs of choice. More area drivers may be driving not just drunk but also drugged. And some are driving both drunk and drugged.

The Houston Forensic Science Center

The Houston Forensic Science Center's website states that local government created the Center to provide independent forensic services to law enforcement agencies, primarily the Houston Police Department. Given its government creation and funding source (the city of Houston provides over 95% of its annual funding), one might question the Center's independence. Frankly, this is still the Houston Police Department Crime Lab with a new name no longer housed in the Houston Police Department building.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

The national story broke in November 2020 that local police in Travis County, Texas, had arrested twenty-five-year-old Dillon Passage, husband of the imprisoned Netflix Tiger King television star Joe Exotic, on a DWI charge. Passage is himself something of a celebrity, having appeared on Tiger King and in tabloid media, and having well over one-hundred-thousand I nstagram followers.

Ordinarily, a DWI arrest is not especially newsworthy, given the nearly one-hundred-thousand such crimes Texas prosecutors charge annually, according to Texas Department of Public Safety crime records. But crime charges of almost any kind quickly become entertainment news when the defendant is even a minor celebrity. And when the celebrity's arrest is notorious for other reasons, as authorities allege in the DWI arrest of Dillon Passage, the event becomes even more newsworthy.

What Not to Do in a DWI Arrest

According to one Texas news report, Dillon Passage allegedly tried to impress police at the arrest scene with his celebrity, telling them of his marriage to the famed Joe Exotic, whose bizarre activities Tiger King documents. Joe Exotic is especially notorious after sensational media reports of his attempted-murder-for-hire conviction relating to his Tiger King nemesis, animal-rights activist Carole Baskin.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

A Texas DWI charge is difficult enough to deal with, for all of a DWI conviction's potential consequences. The lesson here, though, is not to turn a manageable or even beatable DWI charge into something much worse: adding multiple more-serious charges to the DWI violation.

It's an extreme example, but consider: early December 2020 media reports allege that Texas state troopers in Chambers County tried to pull over a vehicle driven recklessly by a Fresno suspect. Prosecutors later filed a DWI charge against the Fresno resident related to his erratic driving. But the DWI charge was only the beginning of the story.

Instead of submitting to arrest, the driver allegedly led the troopers on a high-speed chase ending in the driver's vehicle crash in downtown Beaumont. Media reports that the driver's fruitless flight led to evading-detention and evidence-tampering charges. Flight is not an option. It only adds substantially to the event's risks while leading to additional charges.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

Motor-vehicle crashes are always unfortunate, no matter the contributing causes or severity of the results. But when a vehicle occupant, whether passenger or driver, dies in the crash, mere misfortune can turn to calamity. And when authorities allege driver intoxication as a contributing cause, the event can feel to the charged driver as if hell has broken loose.

One such late-November 2020 account of a Texas fatal accident alleges that an intoxicated twenty-seven-year-old driver steered her vehicle off a Dallas freeway service road and into a light pole, killing her thirty-three-year-old front-seat passenger. The account reports that when the injured driver's intoxication became apparent at the hospital, police arrested the driver on intoxication-manslaughter charges.

Another report of a recent Texas accident in Houston illustrates a similar kind of DWI-related fatality, in which the allegedly intoxicated driver strikes another vehicle, causing its occupant's death. That report alleges that the intoxicated driver of a truck struck a nineteen-year-old driver's vehicle, ejecting the nineteen-year-old from the vehicle and causing her death. The report further alleges that the truck's intoxicated driver then fled the scene but was promptly apprehended, resulting in DWI and failure-to-stop-and-render-aid charges, pending further potential charges.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

The unfortunate report sounds all too familiar: Houston police arresting an allegedly intoxicated woman involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident early Christmas morning. Officers told the media that prosecutors promptly charged the unfortunate 43-year-old suspect with intoxication manslaughter, which is what Texas calls a fatal-accident DWI. The story was unable to identify the male victim.

DWI Hazards for the Holidays

One might think that Christmas wouldn't be a holiday on which to heavily imbibe. Christmas, of all holidays, should be a time for good cheer. But for many, that's not necessarily the case. The holidays, whether Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, or other holidays, are an especially hazardous time relating to intoxicated driving.

Special holiday DWI-enforcement measures prove the holiday-DWI case. Police departments across Texas and the nation focus extra patrols, checkpoints, and other specially funded initiatives around the Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer holidays, everything from Spring Break right on through Memorial Day, Independence Day, and into Labor Day and beyond.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

Safely navigating modern America's many high-speed highways can be a challenge given factors like thick fog, darkness, heavy rain, high winds, construction detours, and congested traffic. Overpasses, underpasses, tunnels, bridges, on-and-off ramps, loops, and turnabouts, and a myriad of signs and signals to do this or that, further complicate driving. The large number of accidents year to year proves driving's naturally high risk.

A vehicle operator's constantly changing mental, physical, and emotional condition, including common disabilities, diseases, stresses, and upsets, multiply accident risks. Drivers also vary in their profiles, affecting driving skills and experience. We've all had the disconcerting experience of noticing drivers who can barely see over the driver's wheel or who look like they're still in elementary school, hurtling down the freeway. Hence the bright warning signs on driver's ed vehicles.

Competent drivers can and do make fundamental errors. Lawyers practicing in the personal-injury field see it all the time: great people with great jobs and families make one momentary mistake on the highway, causing a horrific accident. While the public may not see it that way, the justice system's purpose is not merely to compensate or console the victim but also to redeem the momentary wrongdoer, to lift all burdens.

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 Posted on December 12, 2020 in Uncategorized

It wasn't the best way to start off November. At 2:30 in the morning, on the first of the month, Hopkins County Sheriff Deputies were sent to investigate a vehicle traveling on I-30. When they arrived on the scene, the vehicle accelerated away from them. According to local news reports, that set off an 11-mile chase across two counties. After they stopped the vehicle, using a "spike strip," deputies brought the driver to a local jail, where he allegedly failed field sobriety tests, and then to a hospital for a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) test. He was subsequently charged with "driving while intoxicated" (DWI) with an open container and felony evading arrest.

Cases that involve both a DWI and a charge of evading an arrest are common, but they are difficult to defend, so it's important to have a DWI Specialist at your side.

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 Posted on December 12, 2020 in Uncategorized

How, you might wonder, could a polite little offer of consideration hurt? The answer is plenty, when the intent is to convince an officer making a vehicle stop to forgo a DWI charge. Don't add a daunting bribery charge to a manageable DWI violation. Don't make things go from winnable to potentially worse.

This December 2020 media account of an Alamo resident's alleged actions supplies our instructional example. According to the report, a McAllen police officer wrote in his probable-cause affidavit that he stopped the Alamo resident's vehicle along McAllen's Houston Avenue and confronted him outside the vehicle after the vehicle sped through two red lights. The report alleges the officer smelled alcohol on the vehicle operator whose slurred speech, bloodshot eyes, and admission of a little drinking led the officer to an open alcohol container in the vehicle.

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 Posted on December 12, 2020 in Uncategorized

Every year has its big DWI stories, and the year 2020 has been no exception. The pandemic seems to lead almost every 2020 headline, and DWI coverage is no exception. But 2020 has had its share of other big DWI stories. In this blog series, we will review what 2020's top Texas DWI stories can teach us about defending DWI charges.

The Pandemic Shuffles DWI Trends

Wow, what a difference a global pandemic can make. The 2020 coronavirus pandemic turned upside down industry after industry and trend after trend. Cruise ships, airlines, theaters, resorts, and restaurants shut down in droves, trashing those industries. By contrast, online retailers, video-conferencing services, delivery services, and a lot of big tech companies had solid if not banner years. And the stock market miraculously bounced back to records.

Big pandemic-driven economic patterns influenced these and other industry dynamics. For instance, the pandemic ended the longest U.S. economic expansion on record, longer than a decade. The pandemic produced the largest U.S. economic quarterly contraction on record, shrinking the economy by 9.1%. For perspective, that economic contraction was three times larger than the previous largest contraction. The U.S. lost over 20-million jobs in the contraction. Household spending plummeted but over the summer regained its lost ground.

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