In most Ohio DUI/OVI cases, the evidence includes police officer testimony and police cruiser video. Officer testimony is sometimes not corroborated by the recording from the cruiser video. In such a situation, a judge or jury has to decide if they believe the officer or their own eyes. Such a…
The caller was anonymous, and there was little evidence corroborating the caller’s claim. He or she called 9-1-1 and reported she was driving southbound on Highway 1 and was just run off the road. The caller described a silver Ford F150 truck with a California license plate. It did not…
An Ohio DUI / OVI sentence has several parts. There is mandatory jail time (or a driver intervention program for a first offense), a mandatory fine, and a mandatory license suspension. For a first offense, the license suspension is a minimum of six months and a maximum of three years,…
Someone who has multiple conviction for DUI (called OVI in Ohio) faces increasingly severe consequences with each conviction. For example, while a first OVI typically results in three days in a hotel at a driver intervention program, a third offense with a high test or test refusal is a mandatory…
It’s January in central Ohio, and the temperature is slightly above zero. It’s not exactly golfing weather, and at this time of year, I begin to wonder if we will ever see golfing weather again. It’s not the time of year we think about using golf carts, and most of…
Everyone knows that driving under the influence of alcohol is dangerous. It impairs our vision, increases our reaction time, and makes it challenging to estimate the distance between us and other drivers or objects on the road. Few people, however, consider the danger of driving under the influence of a…
A recent vehicular homicide case in Wisconsin triggers the question of whether Ohio’s implied consent law is constitutional. In that case, a former Lutheran bishop is accused of what Ohio calls Aggravated Vehicular Homicide; causing the death of another person by operating a vehicle under the influence. The bishop was…
Imagine that you are arrested for DUI (called OVI in Ohio), and the officer takes you to a police station to take a urine test. You want to comply, because you’re sure the test will prove you are under the legal limit, but you don’t need to go. In fact,…
I recently represented a client for a DUI / OVI in a juvenile court near Columbus, Ohio. The case went to trial, and I was sharing my experience with a colleague. The colleague happened to be coordinating a DUI / OVI seminar for the Columbus Bar Association, and he asked…
From your bathroom scale to a police officer’s laser gun, every measurement device has a margin of error. For a device to be considered reliable, the margin of error must be known (and should be small!). In a recent Ohio DUI / OVI case, the court decided the admissibility of…