Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

The New Year's holiday can bring much good cheer--sometimes a little too much good cheer. Two Texas-DWI stories illustrate the problem with imbibing irresponsibly over the holidays.

DWI Enforcement Actions over the Holidays

The first of those stories highlights an annual New Year's Eve joint-agency drunk-driving enforcement action involving both local and Texas state police. This particular enforcement action around the University of Texas's Permian Basin campus in Odessa was one of many around Texas and the nation over the holidays. It led to forty-nine arrests. More than half of those arrests were for driving while intoxicated. That's a lot of holiday bad cheer, especially considering the up to $20,000 cost the story reports can result from a first-time DWI conviction.

The second story again highlights an annual local DWI-enforcement action, this one by Garland police outside Dallas. Stretching across both Christmas and New Year's Eve, the action led to dozens of citations and twenty-six DWI arrests. The story reports that Garland police, like many agencies around Texas and the nation, hold special-enforcement actions around other holidays, too. Although Texas state police were not directly involved in the Garland action, Texas Department of Transportation grants helped fund the extra patrols.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

Attitudes about drunk driving have changed a lot. And when defending a Texas DWI charge, knowing that history can make a difference.

Drunk-driving laws are nearly as old as driving itself. One report cites an 1897 London taxi driver as the first to suffer drunk-driving conviction after ramming his vehicle into a building. New Jersey and New York had drunk-driving laws in the first decade of the 1900s. Other states, including Texas, were not too far behind. The early laws often went unenforced, though, especially because police and prosecutors had no reliable way of proving intoxication.

Drunk-driving laws needed better science to support wider enforcement. The advent in 1936 of a balloon-like drunkometer and in 1953 of the more-refined breathalyzer enabled legislators to define unlawful intoxication in ways that police and prosecutors could more-reliably prove. Drunk-driving laws first adopted the National Safety Council's recommended.15% as the lawful blood-alcohol limit and then, with National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advocacy, gradually lowered those limits to.12% and.10%.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

In October 2020, a woman was driving her motorcycle westbound on FM 1090 when, as she was about to make a left turn, she was allegedly hit by a Cadillac SUV. The woman was taken to a hospital, where she later died. At the scene of the accident, law enforcement then arrested the driver, who was under investigation for "driving while intoxicated" (DWI).

While all DWIs should be taken seriously, a DWI involving a fatality is on a different level than other DWIs. It is a tragedy for everyone concerned.

While the memory of the accident will never fade from view, the trauma often causes people to forget that a DWI charge is not a conviction. Just as with every other criminal charge, you have the right to defend yourself, and the prosecution must prove that you were responsible, beyond a reasonable doubt.

To do so, it's important to have a DWI Specialist at your side.

In a DWI-related fatality, a driver is likely going to be charged with intoxicated manslaughter. That means that the state must prove that a driver was intoxicated at the time of the death, but the state does not need to establish that there was any intent to harm; the charge can include fatalities that arose out of an accident or mistake.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

No doubt, getting pulled over under circumstances where an arrest and criminal charges seem imminent may put your cool head at risk. The stress of a vehicle stop increases when the driver knows that the vehicle contains contraband, illegal weapons, or open intoxicants, or if the driver has recently imbibed alcohol or used drugs. The driver's prior DWI convictions or other criminal history further raise the stakes.

One media report of a vehicle stop gone wrong perfectly illustrates the hazards. The December 2020 story alleges that Texas A & M University police tried to stop the vehicle driver early on a Saturday for a moving violation on a campus street, but the driver refused to stop. When the driver did eventually stop on another street, the story alleges that the driver left the vehicle and ran. Officers pursued and subdued the driver who, the story alleges, resisted arrest, requiring several officers to get the driver into the police vehicle.

The media report hints at the reasons, or perhaps poor excuses, for why the driver may have refused, resisted, and run. The account alleges not only that the driver smelled of alcohol but also had glassy eyes and trouble standing, and two prior Brazos County DWI convictions. The account reports that police transported the driver to the local hospital for a blood test, after which authorities charged the driver with evading arrest in a vehicle and third DWI, both third-degree felonies, a state-jail felony of evading arrest with a prior conviction, and a misdemeanor of driving on an invalid license with a prior conviction.

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 Posted on January 01, 2021 in Uncategorized

A Texas DWI charge is significant to just about anyone, considering the potentially severe short- and long-term consequences. Yet those consequences magnify when the defendant is a Texas public official like Montgomery County Judge Mark Keough, whom the county's Office of District Attorney charged December 8, 2020, with a prescription-drug based DWI relating to a September 10th motor-vehicle accident. The court complaint alleges that Judge Keough had the misfortune of striking not just one but two vehicles, the second of which was a deputy constable's cruiser.

It's not that the interests and concerns of public officials are any more important than for the rest of us. We all matter, at least to our families, our employers, and ourselves. The issue is that the public rightly holds officials like judges to higher standards. A DWI charge is embarrassing for anyone, but it can entirely derail a public official's career, especially one serving in the justice system that hears and decides such charges. Judge Keough, like any public official in his position, has a lot riding on the charge's outcome.

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 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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