For a First-Time Offense, Your License Is Revoked Six Months
Video Transcribed: What happens to your license when you get a DUI? My name is Ryan Cannonie, I am the Tahlequah Criminal Defense Attorney for the Wirth Law Office in Cherokee County. And the question I get sometimes is “What about my license? I got charged with a DUI, what about my license?” Well, now sometimes officers will go ahead and take a license and give you a temporary one.
But the law around this is if you’re under 21 and you refuse a blood or breath test, or if you have any measurable quantity of alcohol, any at all, from one of those tests, then your license is going to be revoked. If you are over 21 and you refuse the blood or breath test, or if you’re 0.08 or above, your license is going to be revoked.
Now for a first-time offense, your license is revoked six months. For a second, I believe it’s a year. And then it goes up to three years for a third one. Now, when your license is revoked, let’s say you wait out that year, it doesn’t automatically get reinstated. You’re going to have to, go back and get a new license. You’re going to have to show that you complied with everything you were supposed to.
There’s a lot of requirements when your license is revoked for a DUI. There’s always some type of litigation going on. Here recently, there was a court decision a couple of firms out of Tulsa got, about the breathalyzer machine.
They are pretty well known for tackling those types of issues and they’ve at this point, I think, got the breathalyzer that was being used at one point in time, the results were thrown out. I think that’s up on appeal, but there’s always some type of litigation going on on DUI breathalyzers and how all that works.
So if you have questions about this, then please give us a call, go to tahlequahattorney.com, send us a web form. We can talk to you about your case, see if we can help. There’s a lot of things that you can do when you’re in these cases, but you need to act fast.
So in most situations, you have about 30 days to request a hearing, to try to keep your license from being revoked. There are some situations where you get a little more time and without going into specifics, it depends on what type of test you did, when you get the notice different things like that.
But just as a general rule, you’re going to want to talk to an attorney as soon as possible. And also make sure when you talk to an attorney to ask if they’re just representing you on the criminal, but also the revocation aspect with the Department of Public Safety, DPS. DPS hearings are a civil matter. They’re not criminals. So sometimes they’re included with the DUI retainer fee, sometimes they’re not.
So that’s a question you really need to talk to your attorney about. And like I said, you need to give them a call as soon as possible. If you find yourself in this situation, I told you how to get ahold of us. Feel free to give us a call or an email, and we will see what we can do and see if we can help. Thank you.
