After you are arrested for DUI in Long Beach or anywhere in Southern California, the law enforcement agency that arrested you will take you California driver license and give you a pink piece of NCR paper that is your temporary license. Some officers will tell you what to do next, others won’t say anything about it. You need to know that the pink temporary expires 30 days after the arrest unless you request an extension.

You will only have 10 calendar days after a DUI arrest to contact the DMV Driver Safety Office (not the regular branch) and request a hearing and a “stay of suspension.” Your DUI lawyer should handle all of this for you if you hire him or her in time. The DMV will take your name a driver license number and schedule a hearing – usually about a month or two later. They will ask whether you want to have the hearing in person or by telephone. I think it’s a better idea to request an in person hearing and your DUI lawyer can switch it is he or she sees fit. Most get done by telephone but requesting in person helps ensure that the hearing stays local. The stay of suspension just means that your driving privilege will remain in effect until after the hearing.

The DMV hearing itself is something of a kangaroo court. The entire purpose – the only penalty they can impose – is to suspend your driver license. The hearing officer is also the prosecutor and rules on his or her own objections as well as the defense’s. The only issues at hand in the DMV hearing are:

1) Did the officer have probable cause to stop or contact the driver?

2) Was the driver lawfully arrested?

3) Did the driver have a BAC of 0.08% or higher at the time of test.

That’s it. Those are the only things the DMV considers and they usually just believe whatever the officer writes down. In seven of ten cases, the officer is never called to testify. The sad reality os that most DMV hearings are lost before they are started.

However, there are several potential advantages to even the utterly unwinnable DMV hearings. Chief among those advantages is that the Defense gets a look at the reports and other evidence long before the prosecutor in criminal court does; your DUI lawyer will be able to begin considering and possibly strategizing a defense before the prosecutor even knows that case exists. Another distinct advantage of the DMV hearing process is that, in certain cases, the Defense has an opportunity to examine/cross examine the officer(s) under oath and without all of the restrictive rules of evidence in criminal court. Your DUI lawyer may have an opportunity to lock the officer(s) in to statements that could help the Defense case later in criminal court.

Lastly, from time to time, a good DUI lawyer will be able to exploit one critical weakness in the DMV’s case and win!