Michigan Drunk Driving Stop

I’m now going to describe to you what I believe to be the nine most successful defenses in a drunk driving case.  As you might imagine, it all starts with the stop.  Was the stop legitimate?  Any criminal defense lawyer knows that in order for a stop to be valid, because it is a constitutional event and the fourth amendment applies, the police officer either has to have probable cause or have observed a civil infraction or believed that criminal activity was afoot.  If the police officer can meet that burden then the stop is going to be legitimate.  Of course we start by looking at the police report and every police report you see, I believe, is going to have a basis for the stop written.  There would be an explanation as to why the police officer stopped the car.  The question, of course, is whether or not the description is describing something that is a legitimate basis for the stop.  Or, if in fact the police officer, though describing what he believes to be the legitimate basis for the stop, is actually not met the burden that we’ve discussed. 

For example, I recently was handling a case in a downtown community not un-like Birmingham, it wasn’t down town Birmingham, but it was a community similar to downtown Birmingham.  My client was driving through the down town area and the police officer had stopped his vehicle and was observing the traffic and he heard a loud yell come from my client’s car.  He pulled the vehicle over and wrote in his report that it was based on community caretaker.  He was alleging in his report that he wanted to stop the vehicle to check on the safety of the occupants, to make sure there was no issue with their safety.  Now we typically see community caretaker in the context of a vehicle that has already stopped.  In fact I have handled a number of community caretaker drunk driving cases where the person is pulled over on the side of the road and they are sleeping.  Of course the police officer has a legitimate community caretaker function to go there and check on the well being of the vehicle that’s stopped.  This case is distinguished by the fact that it was used, at least attempted to be used community caretaker, as a basis for the stop of the vehicle. 

Remember, when your thinking about this there’s always the search and the seizure and as it turns out it’s usually the seizure that happens first.  The question in this case was, “Can community caretaker be used not for the search, as in what I just described, but instead for the seizure to stop the vehicle?”  In fact in Michigan there is no case where the community caretaker exception to the 4th amendment has been used to stop a vehicle.  In reviewing the case and discussing it with my client and understanding exactly what happened, we filed a motion and we were able to convince based on our motion, the prosecutor to offer to reduce the charge to careless driving.  My client was happy to plead guilty to this because it was a civil infraction with 3 points and a fine.  Although I think we would have been able to win that at the hearing because the prosecutor offered the deal we were able to get it done. 

There are a variety of other issues that you can spot and look for when determining the validity of the stop.  One that we see on a regular basis is the 911 call.  Is the 911 call itself a legitimate basis to stop the vehicle?  Or if it’s not a 911 call the person has picked up their cell phone and called into dispatch and that dispatch calls it out.  In those instances you have to be very careful to determine where the information came from that is disclosed by the dispatch.  Because the police don’t have the independent basis to stop the vehicle, aside what was reported to them by the caller, there’s a good chance that the stop is not going to be legitimate. 

It all starts with the stop, the most important thing is to thoroughly evaluate the facts of the case, both as they are disclosed in the police report as well as they are disclosed and learned by you in discovering your client’s story, to determine whether or not the stop was legitimate.  If the stop is not valid, of course, the big bonus is the case will be dismissed.

< Back to Video Library