Challenge Your DUI Pre-trial License Suspension

If you are charged with DUI / DWI in Virginia, your license gets suspended immediately for a period of 7 or 60 days. You DO have the right to challenge that suspension.

Video Transcription

Hello, my name is Andrew Flusche. I’m a Virginia traffic attorney. If you’re charged with DUI or DWI in Virginia, you have an immediate administrative suspension of your license, simply due to being charged. For a first offense, that suspension is for 7 days. For a second offense it’s actually 60 days or until the time of trial, whichever comes first. Now, it actually is possible to challenge that administrative suspension. It’s a hearing that we can file with the court to challenge the administrative suspension of your license. There are several bases for challenging that.

On a first offense, the main argument for the challenge is that the officer didn’t have reasonable suspicion to pull you over or he didn’t have probable cause to make an arrest for DUI. If we can win on one of those arguments in court, that could throw out the whole case. So depending on your case, you want to talk to an attorney ASAP about whether or not the officer did have reasonable suspicion and probable cause for your case, two separate legal issues that kind of get very complicated. That is all regarding the 7 day seven suspension.

For a second offense and that 60 day suspension, the additional argument we have is that there’s no proof that you actually have a prior DUI charge. If the officer took out the charge as a second offense and if maybe he read the record wrong (he thought you had a prior DUI but you didn’t, for example) then that would be a very good case and we would want to bring a motion in front of the court to argue that it is not a second offense and that it’s really just a first offense case. And that could have the effect of basically ending your license suspension after only 7 days. So you could go from being suspended for 2 months to just being suspended for a week pending trial.

It can make a big difference and it’s something that you may want to talk to an attorney about, sooner rather than later, to see if it is something that’s possible in your case.