Follow the process. That’s what the drunk driving defense lawyers at GRL Law do with every OWI.
We meticulously sift through every bit of evidence in a case. Every second of video. Each word of an officer’s narrative. All in search of a defense.
And when we find that gold nugget? It can change everything.
Take a recent felony OWI matter in southern Iowa. The Iowa State Patrol claimed our client “refused” a urine test for marijuana metabolites.
The stakes were definitely high. Felony OWI convictions can result in lengthy prison or jail sentences and long license revocations.
By applying the process, we discovered that the trooper lacked reasonable grounds to believe marijuana was involved.
Instead, he was upset that our client blew a 0.067 on the DataMaster DMT. That’s too low for court and the DOT. So he engineered a refusal by denying the driver’s request to know the breath test result (that is against the law). The refusal is often powerful evidence at trial.
The DOT ruled that the refusal was without merit and reinstated his driving privileges.
Ultimately, the district court followed suit and suppressed the refusal from evidence.
That ruling provided the leverage to amend the felony down to a simple misdemeanor.
Our peerless process of unpacking evidence in an OWI case certainly made a difference here.
