Felony DUI Charges in Georgia

If you are facing your second or more DUI conviction, you need a highly-qualified and battle-tested DUI lawyer to handle your potential DUI felony case. That’s right, almost always a first DUI offense is classified as a misdemeanor, if there were no injuries or deaths.

But if you now have been classified as a multiple DUI offender, your additional DUIs can be charged as felony DUIs. This is where a highly-skilled Georgia DUI attorney is mandatory if you want to avoid lengthy jail time and thousands of dollars in court fines, DUI school fees, ignition interlock devices, and community service expenses.

In some complex cases when a person has many prior DUI cases, and they have one that looks pretty bad that we are going into, depending on the court we are in we may be able to do some creative things to help that person mitigate against a very long jail sentence. In a couple of our municipal courts we can go to the prosecutor and say we’ve got a problem here and we want to put this person in treatment. We would like to get credit for every day of treatment or at least for every two days of treatment get one full day of jail credit, knowing that we may have to do the minimum.

Let’s just say it is the second in five but it’s a fifth or sixth lifetime case and that is the applicable standard we are under. It could be now a second and 10 and so we have to look at that. I can go to the prosecutor in some cases and say, “We’re going to put this person in this treatment program and when they come out they will stay in an aftercare program and they’ll go on house monitoring.” That means we put a device on their phone at their house and when they’re not at work they’re home and they have to blow into the device with random phone calls coming to make sure they’re not drinking.

If we get that history built up and do it for several months and go back in front of the judge, I can sometimes reduce that case to 72 hours to serve, a long weekend basically. Whereas a person who walked in with that history and went into that court to plead guilty without doing these things, he or she is going to serve 90 or more days in the county jail. That is the difference between an experienced attorney knowing the system, knowing the players, and working the case. If you have one of those complex cases, do not give up and do not go in there unprepared.

Multiple DUIs, especially back to back arrests, can indicate a problem with alcohol or drug addiction. Our caring DUI attorneys all have a network of alcohol and drug addiction resources that you can turn to for help. Your local DUI lawyer will work with you and your family to get help.