By: Atlanta DUI lawyer and Ex-Police Officer Cory Yager, and one of the best DUI lawyers near me in metro Atlanta Georgia

A DUI arrest for a first offense DUI in Georgia is a disruptive, frightening, and unsettling event. Because the plastic driver’s license is almost always confiscated, the arrested DUI driver’s right to drive becomes questionable, and finding an easy summary of the law on driving under the influence in the Peach State is quite challenging.

Once the arrested person has access to a computer again, he or she begins searching for a DUI law firm with highly rated lawyers for DUI near me. Checking each lawyer ratings, and learning more about Georgia DUI laws, the search for the top Georgia DUI attorney is underway.

By: Georgia Super Lawyer William C. Head, Georgia’s leading Georgia DUI law book author since 1995

DUI laws in Georgia are searched hundreds of times daily. Post-COVID 19, DUI arrests are back up in numbers equal to or greater than before the Pandemic. Even a first offense DUI in GA has some of the nation’s harshest DUI consequences under its GA driving laws.

Those Georgia drinking and driving laws will be reviewed due to the mandatory punishments and DUI consequences Georgia’s legislators have enacted. DUI penalties in Georgia have multiple immutable punishments that a judge cannot “excuse” or waive.

By: Larry Kohn, Georgia Super Lawyer, AVVO Superstar DUI Attorney and member of Best Law Firms in America

Starting in 1970, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the federal government began doling out funding equal to today’s equivalent of about $5 million during a 28-year period. The impetus for doing this came to them after receiving a young woman’s California Ph.D. student’s psychology thesis on this topic in 1970.

Their goal was to come up with some simple-to-do, roadside standardized field sobriety tests (SFSTs). The federal agency’s goal was to create a method of standardizing these police officers’ roadside tests, by conducting research and gathering statistical studies on group performance of sober and drinking subjects.

When police officers are convinced that they are right about an arrest decision, being able to prove the error of the officer’s arrest decision can be daunting. Officers are trained in how to write reports that will pass muster of a supervisory officer, and get approval from a ranking officer. Likewise, officers are trained on how to give courtroom testimony to support their written reports and investigations.

We hear of highly-publicized exonerations of innocent citizens through news reports from The Innocence Project or on TV documentaries, but these are almost always murder cases, which seem to mesmerize and captivate the viewing public. The place where the most wrongful arrests take place, by 100 fold, is in the field of impaired driving arrests. Many police departments have specialized “task forces” for interdiction of DUI-DWI drivers, and often these squads have quotas or “standards” that have to be met in order for the unit to not have to repay federal grant money for low-yield arrest results of the task force.

Even when an officer has made errors for an arrest decision or has jumped to a conclusion that is not clearly supported by the driving conduct, the physical “manifestation” evidence or possibly from witness statements, prosecutors are sometimes unwilling to sift through the questionable evidence to make an independent “call” about the sufficiency of the police officer’s DUI-DWI case. Far too often, the prosecutor takes the arresting officer’s report and summary of the evidence at face value, without digging deeper to see if the officer’s report is contradicted by other, more credible evidence available to the prosecutor. This deferral to the officer’s decision is especially prevalent in cases brought by officers assigned to a DUI task force.