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How much will a good DUI attorney cost?


The cost of hiring a good DUI lawyer varies by jurisdiction.

 You should expect to pay more in large metro areas than in small towns in rural areas. You should expect to pay more for a second offense than a first. You should expect to pay more for a felony DUI than for a misdemeanor. With that in mind, you will find a wide range of fees.

Typically, the top DUI lawyers charge more than new lawyers, or lawyers with lesser skills or reputations. However, there are some good DUI attorneys charging less than some terrible ones. For this reason, price alone should not be your main criteria when selecting an attorney to represent you. As a general rule, when it comes to legal representation, you should not expect anything for free.

A DUI lawyer in private practice will probably not agree to take your case pro bono (for free), even if you have a good case, and even if you shouldn’t have been charged with the offense in the first place. The best way to get a feel for attorneys’ fees in your area is to call around and get several quotes. When the economy is good, many lawyers try to charge as much as possible for each client. When the economy is poor, there are often “bottom-feeder” lawyers who charge insanely low prices for defending DUI cases (say less than $2,000.00 for the whole case) with the idea of getting a high volume of business and driving better lawyers out of business. These “bargain” lawyers typically take on way too many cases to be effective in any of them and often times leave their clients wondering whether they would have been better off with a public defender.

If you want an excellent DUI lawyer (and you should), expect to pay for it. Expect to pay between $4,000.00 and $10,000.00 or more depending on the location, the facts and complexity of the case, your criminal history and other factors. High quality DUI lawyers charge substantial amounts of money to put their expertise and skills to work for you. They often times don’t make any more money than the “bargain” or “bottom-feeder” lawyers, because excellent DUI lawyers are excellent because they view their profession as a calling and accept far fewer cases so they can do the best possible job for each and every client.

Money isn’t always the only determining factor of whether you will be able to hire the best DUI lawyer in your area. The truly excellent DUI lawyers get plenty of referrals and don’t have to beg or bargain for cases. Some will assess you to see if your expectations are realistic and if you personality will be a pleasant one for them to work with. (As an aside, “bargain” lawyers don’t care about their clients’ personalities because typically they plead them guilty at the first possibile opportunity and therefore don’t have to spend much time with them anyways.) Top DUI lawyers spend a LOT of time with their clients and earn their fees.

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Jonathan Blecher, P.A. Serves the Miami-Dade County Area


Cities in Miami-Dade County that we Serve:

Aventura
Bal Harbour
Bay Harbor Islands
Biscayne Park
Coral Gables
Cutler Bay
Doral
El Portal
Florida City
Golden Beach
Hialeah
Hialeah Gardens
Homestead
Indian Creek
Key Biscayne
Medley
Miami
Miami Beach
Miami Gardens
Miami Lakes
Miami Shores Village
Miami Springs
North Bay Village
North Miami
North Miami Beach
Opa-locka
Palmetto Bay
Pinecrest
South Miami
Sunny Isles Beach
Surfside
Sweetwater
Virginia Gardens
West Miami

…And all of Miami-Dade County

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Sleeping it Off, OK’d by New Jersey Court
Drunk behind the wheel of a parked vehicle, even with the engine running and the parking brake off, can’t carry a DWI conviction without proof of intention to drive, a New Jersey appeals court held on Tuesday.

Though unpublished, the ruling is notable for its departure from the New Jersey courts’ usual strict tendency to uphold drunken driving convictions based on observational evidence of any form of operation of a vehicle.

In State v. Putz , A-1004-08, the Appellate Division said the trial court ignored credible evidence that the defendant, who was found asleep in his idling pick-up truck after midnight, had no intent to move the vehicle.

“The conclusion that defendant intended to move the vehicle cannot have been made with respect to the moment of arrest, but must have been predicated upon his ‘intent’ before he fell asleep,” said Judges Mary Catherine Cuff and Christine Miniman.

“Here, defendant’s denial of any intention to drive was at least circumstantially corroborated by the testimony of the other witnesses,” they said. “He was in such a deep stupor at 2:00 a.m. when he was arrested that he could not have had any such intent.”

A Lopatcong police officer found Joshua Putz asleep in his truck outside the entrance to a farm where his girlfriend lived at about 2 a.m. on March 8, 2008. The officer noticed the engine was running but the parking brake was off. When questioning Putz, he detected a strong odor of alcohol and performed a breathalyzer test, which showed a blood-alcohol content of .14 percent.

Charged in municipal court with driving while intoxicated, Putz testified and called witnesses to testify that he had not driven the vehicle but only occupied it. According to the testimony, Putz lent his truck to a friend, Patrick Fletch, then went drinking with another friend, Jeffrey Hackett, at a restaurant in Phillipsburg. At around 11 p.m. on March 7, Hackett dropped Putz off at his vehicle, which Fletch had left in front of a horse farm where his girlfriend, Kim Gapinski, lived as a tenant.

Putz testified that he had planned on spending the night with Gapinski, but although the farmhouse was within walking distance, he waited outside because he had standing orders from the farm’s operator, Tuesday Remsburg, to call before entering the property after dark. Remsburg in her testimony corroborated the arrangement and said Putz had called on at least 20 prior occasions.

However, Putz waited until after midnight to call Gapinski, explaining that he assumed he would see her outside attending to chores and would get her attention. She didn’t come out, and it was cold and rainy, so he went and turned on the engine to get some heat and called Gapinski from his cell phone, but she did not answer and he fell asleep. Gapinski testified she had fallen asleep and noticed the following morning that she had a missed call from Putz at 12:12 a.m. Putz did not wake up until the officer began knocking on the truck window.

Municipal Court Judge Bruce Jones, finding the testimony incredible, convicted Putz, suspended his license for seven months and imposed $665 in fines and penalties. The Law Division, on de novo review, came to the same result.

But Cuff and Miniman said they were troubled by Jones’ determination. “The judge also said, ‘It’s a completely absurd story,’ although he later said that he would keep an open mind with respect to the issue of operation,” the panel said. “We do not believe that he did so. … Many of the details of [the] story were corroborated by other credible witnesses, yet the judge never modified his initial credibility determination.”

Though citing a long line of cases that have allowed “operation” of vehicles to be inferred from a variety of circumstances indicating defendants had been driving while intoxicated, Cuff and Miniman said “we have found no reported decision sustaining a conviction based on an intent long since dissipated by the time of arrest.”

They saw a factual similarity to State v. Daly , 64 N.J. 122 (1973), where the driver, found asleep with his seat reclined, told police he realized he was drunk when he left a bar and decided it would be best to sleep it off. The state Supreme Court found that merely switching on the engine was not proof of intent to move the vehicle.

The Law Division judge had distinguished Daly because in that case, the driver’s seat was reclined while Putz’s was upright. But Miniman and Cuff said, “We are not persuaded by the Law Division judge’s reliance on the fact that the parking brake was not set, defendant’s seat was not reclined, and he did not tell the officer that he was sleeping, but rather that he was waiting for his buddy as sufficient to infer that he had an intent to operate his vehicle at some unspecified point in time. This evidence is simply insufficient to support a reasonable inference of intent to operate given defendant’s prolonged stupor.”

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Obama Chooses MADD Official to Lead Safety Agency


Washington, DC.  April 8 — President Barack Obama has chosen a top official with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lead a Transportation agency that oversees safety and fuel efficiency requirements for automakers.

Chuck Hurley was nominated Wednesday to become administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Hurley, a longtime safety advocate, has served as MADD’s chief executive officer since 2005 and worked for the National Safety Council and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

At MADD, Hurley urged states to adopt tougher drunken driving laws and require first-time offenders to use ignition interlock devices on their cars. The devices require drivers to blow into an instrument that measures alcohol and prevent a vehicle from starting if the driver’s blood alcohol concentration exceeds a certain level…

The organization has received funding from several auto companies, including General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co. and others. The General Motors Foundation provided MADD and MADD-related programs with $133,000 in grants in 2007, according to financial records filed with the IRS.

For more information about DUI, please visit our website at www.duilawdefense.com.

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MADD Proposes Mandatory Ignition Interlock on New Cars


MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), though I don’t know anyone who is in favor of drunk driving has proposed mandatory placement of ignition interlock devices on new vehicles in the U.S.

Toyota, GM and Saab already have these devices near completion for installation at the factories:

Tokyo- Japanese auto giant Toyota Motor Corp. will develop a system to stop a vehicle if it detects the driver is drunk as part of efforts to cope with a serious social problem, a report said on Wednesday.

The system, expected to become available in 2009, analyzes sweat on the palms of the driver’s hands to assess blood alcohol content and would then not allow the vehicle to be started if the reading was above safety limits, the Asahi Shimbun said. The system would also analyze the driver’s eye movement, driving performance and other factors, the Asahi said.

European automakers have developed systems that require the driver to blow into a tube attached to a vehicle to detect alcohol in the breath. Toyota opted not to use that system as it may fail if the driver asks another person to blow into the tube, the Asahi said.

Toyota rival Nissan Motor said last year it was planning similar steps.

From CBS News:

You have a few drinks, climb behind the wheel of your car, turn the key and — nothing. The engine doesn’t turn over, the car doesn’t move.

If Mothers Against Drunk Driving has its way, a device that checks a driver’s alcohol levels will be mandatory in cars owned by anyone ever convicted of drunk driving, and, eventually, every automobile.

New Mexico already has such a law.

MADD, backed by a national association of state highway officials and car manufacturers, is announcing a campaign to change drunken driving laws in the other 49 states to require such devices for first-time offenders.

“We’ll focus on that problem of separating the drunk driver from the vehicle,” MADD president Glynn Birch told CBS Radio News.

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