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As reported, an alleged drunk driver was involved in a fatal crash and charged with DUI and reckless homicide. A reckless homicide conviction could result in prison time, and a conviction for DUI or reckless homicide will cause a driver’s license revocation, the length of which will depend upon the driver’s previous driving record and whether the conviction is for DUI or reckless homicide.

A knowledgeable, highly experienced Illinois driver’s license reinstatement lawyer will explain to you that the Illinois Secretary of State, Department of Administrative Hearings considers fatal accidents to be the most serious type of case his office hears. In the typical Illinois Driver’s License Reinstatement Hearing, the Secretary of State has only limited information about your Illinois DUI arrest. In a fatal accident case, he will have all the police investigate reports, accident reconstruction reports, photographs, a transcript of the county coroner’s inquest and jury verdict, the crash report, the autopsy, and the grand jury indictment or the criminal information or complaint filed against you.

For hearings involving fatality, the Secretary of State allows extra time on his calendar to hear the case. This is done because you will be questioned in detail about all the information in the materials that the Secretary of State has gathered from the State’s Attorney and the police. In addition, the Secretary of State will notify the family members of the deceased that you have requested a Driver’s License Hearing and will advise them of their right to appear and testify at the hearing.

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Ron Larson argues that DUI is nothing more than a scheme to extract money from the accused. He blames various actors involved in the DUI process for turning a DUI arrest into an expensive proposition. His solution is to remove all of them from the equation and automatically sentence someone charged with DUI to a year in prison.

Larson claims that DUI lawyers are an unnecessary expense. Let’s examine his thesis more carefully.

DUI is a crime. Under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, anybody in this country who is charged with a crime is entitled to legal representation. This right is considered so important that the United State Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that the government is required to provide a free attorney to anyone who is accused of a crime and cannot afford an attorney.

Therefore, the author’s solution- removing lawyers from the process- would require repeal of the Sixth Amendment. Were that to occur, no person charged with an offense- from speeding to murder- would have the right to a lawyer.

Under Larson’s concept, you would not be given the chance to defend yourself and a mere accusation would stand as proof of your guilt. This would place our country’s legal system on the same footing as those of North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, where authorities imprison their political opponents on the basis of trumped-up charges that the accused has no right to contest through a lawyer.

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To much fanfare, in 2009 Illinois instituted a DUI prevention program. Its publicly stated purpose was to prevent drunk driving.

Under the Monitoring Device Driving Permit (MDDP), if you are an Illinois driver arrested for DUI, your license will be suspended for 6 to 12 months if you have not been arrested for DUI in the previous 5 years. During all but the first 30 days of the suspension, you are entitled to an MDDP.

The MDDP allows you to drive for any purpose. However, at your expense, you must have a device installed in your vehicle’s ignition and blow into a tube in order to start your vehicle.

The Illinois Secretary of State receives a fee for administering the program, as do the providers of the devices. Therefore, the providers and the Secretary of State had a financial interest in seeing that this program was put in place and continue to profit from keeping it going and maximizing its usage. Under current law, installation of the device is optional.

The assertion by advocates of the MDDP program that it has been successful, as evidenced by both its level of usage (6,500 devices installed in 2009) and reductions in fatal accidents, is questionable. They credit the program with reducing the number of fatalities, ignoring the impact of the recession and the corresponding reduction in miles driven. (These are the same folks who have brought us highly questionable claims of how often a person drives under the influence without being caught).

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The consequences in Wisconsin for DUI are quite less severe than those for a DUI arrest in Illinois. What do those penalties and other consequences include?

In Illinois, DUI is a Class-A misdemeanor for a first or second offense. The punishment is up to 364 days in county jail and/or a fine of up to $2,500.

The consequences of a first offense can be lessened if you are sentenced to court supervision. Court supervision is available only once in your lifetime and only if you have not previously been convicted of DUI.

In order to receive supervision, you must plead guilty to DUI but the judge does not enter a conviction on your record provided that you complete all of the supervision requirements, which includes staying out of legal trouble during the 1-2 years your supervision is in effect, paying all fines and other fees, completing the alcohol counseling, attending a victim impact panel or other requirements that your judge might choose to impose.

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You may be facing your first DUI charge. It could have been one of those fluke situations–you had a couple of drinks too many this one time and ended up driving. That can happen in real life.

However, because of pervasive distorted reporting by powerful interest groups and their media mouthpieces, the DUI system operates under different assumptions. These assumptions explain why the DUI arrest and driver’s license reinstatement hearing processes may not function as you would expect.

First, some background will be helpful. There are two related but different tracks in an Illinois DUI situation. DUI is a crime that can result in jail and or fines. You are presumed to be innocent of the crime of DUI until proven guilty.

A DUI arrest can also result in license sanctions (suspension), and more severe sanctions (revocation) result from a conviction. The law does not consider the license sanctions to be in the nature of criminal proceedings and therefore the protections afforded in the criminal case (such as innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt) do not apply. If your license is revoked for DUI, you must prove to the Illinois Secretary of State that you will be a safe driver in the future.

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If you are convicted of DUI and have an Illinois driver’s license, your license will be revoked. You must then submit yourself to a driver’s license reinstatement process before you are allowed to drive legally. The length of time you are required to wait before being eligible for reinstatement depends upon your age, the type of offense you committed and your previous driving record.

Something to keep in mind during this discussion: You may have been convicted of DUI in another state while driving on your Illinois driver’s license. If that conviction appears on your Illinois driving record, it will be treated as though it occurred in Illinois.

Illinois drivers may (but not necessarily will) receive court supervision for their first DUI offense. Court supervision is not a conviction and it does not result in a driver’s license revocation. In supervision cases, your license might be suspended, but it will not be revoked. This means that once the suspension period is over, you pay a fee and are automatically reinstated without a hearing.

A first conviction, on the other hand, results in a one-year revocation of your driver’s license. However, the Secretary of State will not automatically return your license to you (as happens in the case of a suspension). The end of the revocation period only signifies that upon attending a hearing, you are entitled to ask for your license.

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In Illinois, the county coroner’s office works with various police agencies within the coroner’s county. This recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times online concerns the deputy coroner of Will County Illinois (suburban Chicago) who was arrested on suspicion of DUI. If the police report is accurate, she seemed to imply that her position of authority justified special treatment (“Don’t you know who I am?”)

Here are some tips to keep in mind if the police stop you and you are concerned about being charged with DUI.

First, statements that imply guilt (“give me a break”, “I can’t get another DUI”, “I am only 2 blocks from home, can’t you cut me some slack”) put you in a position of having to provide the judge and jury with an innocent explanation for your statements, and there is an old saying in the law, if you are explaining, you are losing. And these pleas for mercy never work.

Likewise, being belligerent (“I will have your badge”, “I will sue you”, “I am getting railroaded”, “you guys are all on the take”) does not help. Moreover, if the arrest is taped, and most of them are, your actions will leave the judge and jury who view the video with a negative impression of you.

Furthermore, most law enforcement officers encounter so many people on the job that by the time your case gets to trial, the typical officer in the typical arrest will not remember anything about your case other than what is in his notes. But if you have gone out of your way to be rude, that officer is likely to remember you better than the other people who are polite and cooperative. (the nail that sticks out is most likely to get hammered).

In addition, police are human. If you have treated the officer fairly, he is less likely to register a protest if the state officers you a good “deal”. While the prosecuting attorney has final say in those matters, many of them take the arresting officer’s input into account.

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You can be charged in Illinois with Driving Under the Influence (DUI) even though the police may not actually observe you driving. This Chicago Sun-Times article describes a man who was charged with DUI despite the fact that at the time of the arrest, his car was pulled over and notwithstanding the fact he was rear-ended.

Blake, perhaps concerned that he was too impaired to be driving, parked his car on the shoulder. Although he failed to pull completely over, the fact remains that his vehicle was struck from behind and he was not driving at the time. However, Illinois DUI law provides that you are considered to be driving under the influence if you are in “actual physical control” of your vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

Many DUI arrests begin when authorities find a driver asleep behind the wheel, or asleep in the back seat of the car, or even outside of the car. As long as the state can prove to a jury that the driver either had been driving or was capable of driving before he sobered up, that is enough.

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Since 1984, federal law has required all 50 states to implement a drinking age of 21. Failure to do so results in a loss of federal highway funds. A recent newspaper article discusses proposed actions in the state of Virginia regarding alcohol possession by those under the age of 21. These laws, like those of many other states, go far beyond what the 1984 law requires.

Because laws in this regard vary from state to state, you should consult an Illinois DUI lawyer if you or anyone you know who is under the age of 21 receives any type of drinking ticket. In addition, even if you do not receive a ticket but have a driver’s license or ID confiscated from you, your driving privileges are in jeopardy.

This state has a Zero Tolerance Law Under that law, if you are under the age of 21 and are stopped for a traffic violation and the officer has reason to believe you have been drinking, the officer may demand that you take a breath or blood test.

If that test shows an alcohol level above zero, your driver’s license will be suspended for 3 months if this is your first zero tolerance offense. If you refuse to take the test and this is your first zero tolerance offense, the Secretary of State will suspend your license for 12 months. If you are a repeat zero tolerance offender, your license will be suspended for 6 months if you fail the test and 2 years if you refuse to take the test.

Illegal transportation of alcohol (open container in the vehicle) is a violation of the law regardless of the driver’s age. However, if you are under 21 and are convicted of illegal transportation, your license will be suspended for 12 months for a first conviction, and it will be revoked upon a second conviction.

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If this is your first Illinois DUI arrest, things may not be as bad as they could be. The sentence that celebrity playwright and actor Sam Shepard received for his Bloomington, Illinois DUI arrest is fairly typical for first offenders.

The term “first offender” has two very different meanings for someone arrested for an Illinois DUI. That is because an Illinois DUI takes two related but different tracks.

At the time of the DUI arrest, the police will almost certainly ask you to take a breath test. Unless you take the test and register less than .08, your license will be suspended. The length of the suspension will depend upon whether you took or refused the test and whether or not you are a first offender.

Before I go any further, you should understand the difference between an Illinois driver’s license suspension and an Illinois driver’s license revocation.

A suspension is for a limited amount of time. When the suspension ends, your license is automatically returned to you upon payment of the appropriate fee.

A revocation is for a specified period of time during which you cannot drive, just like a suspension. However, unlike a suspension, a revocation ends only after you have an Illinois driver’s license reinstatement hearing with the Illinois Secretary of State. In other words, it is not automatic.

Remember that a driver’s license suspension occurs if you refuse the breath test or take and fail it. A driver’s license revocation occurs if you are convicted of DUI.

For purpose of the suspension, you are a first offender if you have not had a DUI arrest in the previous 5 years. If you have had a DUI arrest in the previous 5 years, you are a non-first offender.

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