(0:40) Today we are going to talk about DUI.
(1:00) We have all seen billboards and advertisements that say, “don’t drink and drive”.
(1:10) Pennsylvania is a DUI stacked tiered penalty.
(1:20) PA looks at 10 years. And they say well, how many DUIs has the person had in 10 years, have they ever been charged with a DUI?
(1:30) Is this their 1st? 2nd? Or 3rd? They also look at things called blood alcohol levels. In PA, anything that is .08, that is the illegal limit
(1:40) to be driving, all the way up to .10, that is 1st tier. Anything from .10 to .15,
(1:50) is 2nd tier, and anything from .16 and above is 3rd tier. PA also deals with under the influence of drugs
(2:00) or a combo of drugs and alcohol, and if a person does that it is automatically 3rd tier. Let’s talk about what happens when a person gets pulled over and accused of DUI. The officer
(2:10) gets the driver out of the car, they have you do these standard field sobriety tests, have people follow
(2:20) a pen, do a walk and turn, stand on one leg, and do all these other tests. If the officer says this person has failed
(2:30) the tests and they are under the influence, then they move onto the 2nd part which is now you get compelled under the law to give blood or go and do a
(2:40) breathalyzer at a machine.
(2:50) If it is a breathalyzer machine you get the results right then and there.
(3:00) If you get taken to the hospital, it comes back within a month or two and the officer waits on that paperwork, and then will mail that out to
(3:10) the person and let them know they have been charged. At this point the officer
(3:20) might just be waiting on that blood result to come back to determine whether you are DUI.
(3:30) So now, something has come in the mail, it tells you exactly what the blood alcohol is, sometimes they don’t, and they don’t tell you till you get to court. So, because PA is a tier state, you have tier 1,
(3:40) tier 2, tier 3, and basically the penalty or the different things that can happen to a person accused of DUI is based on that. If you are .08-.10
(3:50) has a maximum penalty of 6 months’ probation. If you are tier 2, it has a mandatory minimum of 48 hours in prison.
(4:00) If you are tier 3 it has a mandatory minimum of 3 days in prison. An experienced attorney like myself, there are other things that can take place
(4:10) sometimes just house arrest and avoid jail all the way. It depends on a lot of things.
(4:20) If this is the third time you have been in trouble for a DUI, and it’s the third tier, well you are looking at a mandatory minimum of 1 year in state prison
(4:30) and a felony in the 3rd degree. As you can see, the 1st offense would have been 72 hours in jail and an ungraded misdemeanor, but the 3rd time it occurs, you are looking at 1 year in state prison, and a felony offense.
(4:40) In PA, DUIs stack.
(4:50) ARD is Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition Program. If you are a person who has never been in trouble,
(5:00) good for you. You have never had a problem, and you went out and you had too much to drink and now you find yourself charged with DUI.
(5:10) didn’t run from the police, you had insurance, you had a driver’s license, but you got this DUI, you could qualify for that program.
(5:20) Just because you may qualify doesn’t mean you automatically get it. The district attorney’s office has the sole discretion on whether or not to offer ARD.
(5:30) The last thing I’m going to leave you with is this, people often say “hey I cant lose my license!” “I have a good job” or
(5:40) “I drive the kids back and forth to school”. Unfortunately in PA, the law for DUI does not care about your personal circumstances or how bad you need your car.
(5:50) The good thing about ARD is instead of losing your license for 1 year, you would only lose your license for 2 months.
(6:00) Different things occur, as people get DUIs, there is different things interlock. You have to blow into a machine, it is called a blow and go, and I will tell you, this is not legal advice
(6:10) for DUI, and the reason why I tell you that is because the laws for DUI change all the time. I mean PA just enacted new laws called the Deana’s Law,
(6:20) and has increased the penalty for a third DUI. That was different just a couple years ago.
(6:30) If you are here, you probably got arrested for a DUI
(6:40) and trying to figure out what goes on. I will tell you, as you find out the blood-alcohol, or the actual level from the breathalyzer,
(6:50) and all those things, a lot more will come into play to figuring out exactly what you are looking at.