DUI Charges: Preliminary Court Hearing

With most DUI charges, once you have been officially released from jail under the provisions of a bond or bail, you will be scheduled for a preliminary approximately 20 days after the arraignment hearing. This hearing is designed to establish a plea of innocence or guilt and is declared by you or with an attorney. During this hearing a district attorney or prosecutor with present the evidence of your crime before a judge as an attempt to establish a trial date.

At this time you will be given several options. The first option is to enter a plea bargain for the DUI/DWI charges by the admission of guilt. Should you elect a guilty plea, then it will be up to the judge overseeing your case to issue a sentence. Before entering a guilty plea for the charges, you should carefully consider the implications this may have as well as the possible punishment that may be handed down. Once you plead guilty to a DUI crime, the plea bargain cannot be retracted but will remain in force pending sentencing. A good lawyer representing your DUI case should be able to advise you on the maximum possible degrees of punishment that a judge may sentence you with.

Should you decline to enter a plea bargain, then a pretrial conference date will be set between all parties involved to discuss the evidence of the crime based upon the facts of the case to see what evidence will be admissible in court before you go to trial. This is an important meeting for two essential reasons and it usually takes place behind closed doors with the judge, state prosecutor and your lawyer.

Measuring the Weight of the Incriminating Evidence

First, depending on the evidence outlined against you, your attorney will be trying to get any incriminating evidence against you thrown out on the grounds that it may have been unconstitutionally obtained by the arresting authorities. A good example of this would be if a police officer pulled you over even though you did not break any traffic laws or have any discrepancies on your vehicle such as a broken tail light or side mirrors and then testing your BAC level at the police station. Given that you were pulled over without committing a traffic crime, a lawyer could argue that any incriminating DUI charges along with the evidence in connection with your arrest is inadmissible in court and should be thrown out. Believe it or not, this happens very often.

Plea Bargaining Your DUI Crime to a Lesser Offence

The second reason this pretrial meeting is deemed critical is that if the attorney cannot get the incriminating evidence dismissed, then he or she will begin the process of establishing a plea bargain deal with the prosecutor in hopes of getting the charges reduced to a lesser crime and therefore a less severe punishment. These plea bargain negotiations will continue between all the legal parties until your attorney feels they have a reached the best possible deal for you. Depending on the type of plea arrangement all parties concur to, this may be your best option when you consider that according to the latest statistics, around 90% of DUI cases are resolved by plea bargaining.

Given that most county court systems are backlogged for trial cases, it is in the best interest of the District Attorney’s Office to agree to a plea bargain in exchange for a trail by jury. This reduces the financial constraints of going through a jury trial and relieves the court system so they can handle more serious criminal cases.