Building a Defense For DUID Charges in Virginia Beach
Due to the serious penalties that can accompany a DUID charge in Virginia, it is important that you put forth the strongest possible defense with the help of a Virginia Beach DUI Drug lawyer. An experienced attorney will be able to examine the various aspects of your stop and arrest, and ensure that your blood was taken in the correct manner. To learn more about the different defense possibilities for your case, call and schedule a free consultation today.
Defense Strategies For DUID Charges
The first place to start with the drug DUI is the same place you start with any DUI, which is just to see why the officers stopped the vehicle in the first place. If you can successfully challenge the reason for the stop then there’s no need to go any further because the whole rest of the case is inadmissable.
If there was a good reason to stop the car, the next step is to challenge what happened at the scene. That means analyzing the field sobriety tests and how the officer administered them and how the defendant did on them. After that, it gets more complicated because the defenses will go towards the blood test. The defenses will relate to how the blood was handled after it was drawn from the defendant up until it was tested by the Department of Forensic Science.
If there was any type of mishandling of the blood sample at that point then that could be cause to have the case dismissed. Or if the blood was drawn too long after the defendant was actually driving, then this compromises the results as well.
Expert Witnesses
For a DUI case, the prosecution generally will enlist the testimony of the person who drew the blood from the defendant. This person can testify about how the blood sample was handled and about the timeframe in which it was taken from the defendant in relation to when the defendant was pulled over. Sometimes the prosecution can also get a person to come in from the Department of Forensic Science who can then testify regarding the actual testing of the blood as well as helping to interpret the results and explain what they mean to the court.
Generally speaking the weight this testimony is given at trial depends on the expert and their experience and qualifications. It’s important to get all of this out to understand exactly why someone is testifying as an expert witness instead of a lay person because some experts are going to hold more weight than other experts. In general however, being an expert witness makes you hold more weight than someone who’s not an expert.
Challenging the Claims of An Expert Witness
As a lawyer, you can challenge the expert’s claims in a variety of ways. You can question the qualifications and experience of the expert in cases like the one in issue. You can also question how the sample was handled and also whether the expert was the only person who actually did handle the sample or if there were other people who aren’t present in court who did handle it as well.
If there are other people who handled it and they aren’t there, you can question why the other people are not present in court. The attorney can question the significance of the results and how conclusive the findings actually are.
Mixing of Alcohol and Drugs
Mixing can definitely have an effect on how the case is prosecuted and thereby make it more difficult to defend. For prosecutors, mixing of alcohol with drugs provides two separate avenues of impairment that they can now attack. They can question the person on the drugs that they took and they can question the person on the alcohol. This can also cause the prosecutors to really want to get a conviction on the charge more intensely than if it had just been one or the other involved. For the defense, it can provide an ultimate explanation for why the defendant was impaired that maybe didn’t relate so much to the defendant being irresponsible and just deciding to drink and get behind the wheel.
Instead it points more to an unexpected reaction that was caused by the mixing which couldn’t have been prevented by anybody who was being responsible.