Virginia DUI – Watch the Video
If you have a Virginia DUI / DWI, your attorney should seek and watch any available cruiser video. The video could contradict the officer’s version of events.
Video Transcription
Hello, my name is Andrew Flusche. I’m a Virginia traffic attorney. If you’re charged with a DUI or DWI in Virginia, your attorney needs to get the video. The video from the cruiser should be running during any kind of traffic stop, especially a DUI. That can be very informative about what happened during the actual driving behavior the officer claims to have witnessed and also during the interaction between you and the officer.
Now, let me stop there and say that not every cruiser has video. Some areas are better than others; some departments have video on all their cruisers, and some don’t have video in many of their cruisers at all. So it may not apply in your case. Even in cases where there is video equipment, it does malfunction quite a bit. It’s somewhat high-tech and I guess some of the departments don’t have the best equipment, or maybe not very new stuff, and so there are malfunctions in recording and getting it downloaded to the server where it can be viewed.
However, if there is any video, and your attorney should be checking for that, that’s something your attorney should be watching. That’s something I do when at all possible. On a DUI/DWI case I will ask if there is any video and if there is, we need to watch it when we can to see if it confirms what the officer is claiming. Now, I’m not saying that the officers would lie at all, but sometimes memories are a little fuzzy about what happened, about the specifics of a situation, especially when it’s something that may be very close, like crossing a line. Did you really cross the line completely with your tire? Were you just close to the line? Did your tire touch the line but not cross all the way? Something like that, the mind might see something, but the video might contradict that and could give us an argument that we could argue in court.
So your attorney should be checking if there is any video and, when at all possible, he should be watching the video to see if there is anything that could be helpful for your defense.