Minneapolis DUI lawyer David Lundgren recently sat down to provide detailed information on Minnesota DUI charges. For the full transcript, please scroll below the video.
Transcript for Minnesota DUI Charges | Minneapolis DUI Lawyer
Hi, my name is David Lundgren. I’m a DUI attorney at Lundgren and Johnson.
Our practice area is exclusively criminal defense, and a large portion of that criminal defense practice is dedicated to defending DUI charges.
Information on License Revocation after DUI Charges
One of the most important things to keep in mind after you’ve been arrested for DUI is your license will be revoked after a seven day time period.
Following the offense, you have a 7-Day temporary permit to drive for the seven days following your arrest. But after that, you will not be able to drive. In conjunction with that you will only have 60 days in order to challenge the license revocation through judicial review.
This means if you don’t file a challenge either administratively during the revocation period, or through a judicial review within 60 days, that license revocation will be permanent. The revocation will always be on your record for the remainder of your life time.
You’ll have to serve the entirety of that license revocation even if you walk into a criminal courtroom on the criminal charges and walk away with a complete dismissal.
That’s because even though they’re related to the same incident, there’s two separate things that get triggered once you’re arrested for DUI.
The first is the civil license revocation portion – and you’ll receive notice of that. Second are the criminal charges that result from that offense.
Field Sobriety Testing for DUI Charges
If you were arrested for DUI, you likely completed some field sobriety tests before you were arrested.
Some things to keep in mind about those field sobriety tests are that they are standardized tests, which means that they have to be administered in a standardized manner.
And in fact, there’s a whole DUI field sobriety test manual that law enforcement officers are trained on. If you can’t tell, the manual is fairly thick.
It is very detailed about the steps that have to be taken by the officer and how the tests are administered.
Because they’re standardized tests, if the officer did not complete those tests in the standardized manner, then the conclusions to be drawn from those tests are not sound.
The officer’s conclusion that you were impaired or likely impaired because of your performance on the field sobriety tests can be invalid if he or she administered the tests incorrectly.
A good DUI lawyer will know those field sobriety tests backward and forward:
- How the tests need to be completed by the officer;
- How the tests need to be administered by the officer;
- What the officer should be looking for as far as your performance on those tests.
If your case proceeds to trial, those tests and the administration of those tests by the officer can be challenged in a meaningful way.
If you’d like to learn more about field sobriety testing and the administration of the tests in general, we have an article on our website. I’ll put the link in the description below.
DataMaster Breath Tests and Uncertainty of Measurement
It’s important to know that the results of the test that you took – if it was a DataMaster breath test – aren’t necessarily what they appear.
The result you get after you complete the breath test is a printed out graph. It will have two different graphs with your blood alcohol concentration curve as measured by the DataMaster machine.
What’s important to note is that the numerical value, the final value of the DataMaster Test, is only the machine’s best guess at what your blood alcohol concentration is at that point in time.
There’s an uncertainty of measurement that is built within the machine. The number that’s given is just the median value of the machine’s best guess.
There’s actually a range on the lower end and the higher end where your blood alcohol concentration could be. There’s a mathematical formula that provides the percentages of how likely it is that your blood alcohol concentration was actually lower than that amount and the percentage that it was actually higher than that amount.
Retrograde Extrapolations for DUI Charges
DUI charges that rely upon your blood alcohol concentration, either from a blood, breath, or urine test, require that the state prove your blood alcohol concentration, either at the time you were driving or within two hours after the time you were driving. This requirement is established by Minnesota Statute Section 169A.20.
For most DUI charges it’s the latter, meaning two hours after the time you were driving because the State either has your blood, breath, or urine test that was taken within that period of time.
But there are a handful of cases, and not an insignificant amount of cases, where that blood breath or urine sample is not taken within the two hour time frame.
For those DUI charges, the state is required to prove and show some evidence about what your blood alcohol concentration was within that two hour time period. The way this is normally done is through what’s called a retrograde extrapolation of your blood alcohol concentration.
The State does that by providing whatever police reports and documents that they have about the testing process to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Once it gets to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a forensic scientist will look over all of those reports and plug some variables into a mathematical formula. The formula estimates what your blood alcohol concentration actually was within that two hour time frame.
Now the science that the mathematical formula relies upon requires a set of known variables in order to complete it. Oftentimes those variables are not known to the State, but that doesn’t stop the BCA scientist from still going forward and making the calculation.
In those circumstances that calculation is subject to a pre-trial attack on the reliability and admissibility of that retrograde extrapolation based on its unreliability.
If you’re interested in learning more about retrograde extrapolations and the different issues that can come up in a DUI case and trial when the state’s evidence relies upon a retrograde extrapolation, we have an article that details all of those issues fully. I put a link in the description below.
Contact Our Experienced and Award Winning DUI Attorneys Today
If you’re facing DUI charges, you owe it to yourself to learn as much about that offense as possible so that you can be prepared to assist your DUI lawyer in defending you against those charges.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time writing articles and putting them on our website just about that topic. I put a link in the description below to our main DUI page. The bottom of the page has links to all of the different topics we’ve written about DUI.
Now this video and our articles are not meant to be legal advice. They’re meant to be reference information for you so that you can learn a bit about DUI offenses and the different defenses that apply.
If you’ve been arrested for DUI, consider giving me a phone call to discuss your circumstances. Over the last eight years I’ve obtained many positive outcomes for my clients in DUI cases.
I’ve received awards and recognitions for my DUI practice.
If you call, we can talk about the civil consequences to your DUI charges, the civil license revocation, as well as a potential plate impoundment and motor vehicle forfeiture.
We can also discuss the criminal DUI charges and a roadmap moving forward to get you back on the road and start putting a successful defense together. I put a link in the description below to our website.
Our contact information is also there including our phone number.
I look forward to speaking with you shortly.