You have been Arrested for Drunk Driving in Maine, Now What?
You may have been pulled over by a police officer. You have probably submitted to the standard three field sobriety tests. You have probably answered some of the police officer’s questions. Police took you to the police station or directly to the jail. You took a breath alcohol test. You paid a bail commissioner to set your bail. You are back home and have a mix of feelings: shame, embarrassment, fear…
So what should you expect and what should you do to get control of this situation?
Here are some answers to some of your likely questions:
Keep driving, you still have your license.
Some folks mistakenly believe that they have lost their right to drive in Maine once they are arrested on an O.U.I. charge. You will likely be able to keep driving for at least a month after your arrest. But you could lose your right to drive in Maine before you are convicted of an O.U.I. at court. It probably does not seem fair to lose your license before you are convicted. But Maine does have an administrative process to suspend your driver’s license before you have been convicted of an O.U.I.
The most important thing to keep in mind about an O.U.I. in Maine is that there is not one legal case but two legal cases that arise from a single O.U.I. incident. There are two cases because two different branches of Maine’s government can suspend your driver’s license: the judicial branch and the governor. The judicial branch takes your license at court upon conviction of certain driving crimes. The governor acts to take your license through the secretary of state and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (“B.M.V.”). One of the reasons keeping your license after an O.U.I. incident can be challenging is because of the fact that Maine has these two chances to take your license.
The Administrative Case
The police officer who arrested you will send to the B.M.V. a copy of her police report along with several other documents from your O.U.I. case. The B.M.V. will process these documents and will send a notice of suspension to the mailing address that B.M.V. has on file for you. It is important and is required by law that you keep your address up-to-date with B.M.V. If B.M.V. unknowingly sends the notice of suspension to an old address, your license may be suspended without you knowing it. The penalties for operating with a suspended license for an O.U.I. suspension are usually more serious than for the O.U.I. itself. A mail-forwarding request filed with the Postal Service will not ensure that the O.U.I. notice of suspension is forwarded to your new address. You can call B.M.V. at 207-624-9000 to check your record mailing address.
How long after the arrest does B.M.V. send a notice of suspension?
Usually it takes between one and two months. But this delay depends primarily on how soon after the arrest the police officer sends to B.M.V. his police report.
The first thing that we do after you hire us is to file with the B.M.V. a written request for a hearing to contest the administrative suspension of your driver’s license. One effect of this in most cases is that you will be able to continue driving after the suspension effective date that B.M.V. has printed on its written notice of suspension. (If the police officer alleges that you failed to take a chemical test, then your license truly will go under suspension on the date listed on the written notice.)
If we prevail at the administrative hearing, your license is restored to you immediately. Then the only risk to your license would come from the criminal court (usually the administrative case is finished before the criminal case).
One of the most important actions that you can take on your own to minimize the consequences to your license is to contact the Maine Office of Substance Abuse to sign up to meet your D.E.E.P. requirement. Call that office at: 207-626-8600. The office’s web address is: https://www.maine.gov/dhhs/samhs/osa/deep/
Bail
You likely posted money after you were arrested. $60.00 of that went to pay the bail commissioner who set your bail. Any money that you paid beyond that $60.00 is the cash bail. When will you receive your money back? You will not receive the $60.00 back. But you may receive the rest of your bail money back, usually at the conclusion of the criminal case. (If the criminal case ends with the court imposing a fine on you, the Court will keep any bail amount posted in your name unless you pay the fine amount in full on the day of the conviction. )
There are some important things to remember about your bail.
The bail bond is a court order. If you break any of the rules that the order has set for you, you may go back to jail and may even be charged with a new crime (violation of conditions of release). The bail bond likely prohibits you from drinking alcoholic beverages. That means, among other things, that you cannot have any alcoholic beverages at your residence. Does it mean that your spouse cannot drink at home because you are on bail? If your spouse does not want you to be arrested for violating your bail, then yes, as a practical matter, your spouse cannot drink at home.
If you are prohibited from possessing alcohol or drugs under the bail bond, you are also likely to be subject to a search condition. This search condition is either search “upon articulable suspicion” or search “without articulable suspicion or probable cause.” These search conditions take away your traditional Fourth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution to be free from unreasonable searches or seizures.
Maine in times past has, out of all of the fifty states, over-used these search conditions in bail orders.
Bail commissioners are no longer able to write bail bonds with search conditions that do not require at least articulable suspicion. If your bail allows searches without suspicion, this means that police can come to your home in Maine at any time and demand entry so that they may search for prohibited items. The U.S. Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the constitutionality of pretrial search conditions for people who have not yet been convicted of a crime. It is our view that once the Court does rule on these issues, suspicionless searches of homes upon these bail conditions will be shown to violate the Constitution.
If you read your bail conditions closely you will see that there is no condition requiring you to answer police questions. Do not ever answer police questions without your lawyer being present.
Should You Hire an O.U.I. Defense Attorney?
If you go to your first court event to enter your initial plea on a misdemeanor O.U.I., the prosecutor will likely give you a plea offer to resolve your criminal case that day. And that plea offer will likely involve you pleading guilty to the O.U.I. and receiving the minimum sentence required by Maine law.
This will involve you having an O.U.I. conviction on both your criminal record and driving record for the rest of your life.
This will involve you receiving an automatic suspension of your driver’s license.
And this will cause you to be prohibited from entering some foreign countries such as Canada. A jail sentence may or may not be included with the prosecutor’s offer.
If these consequences do not sound bad to you, then you may choose not to hire an attorney.
You should at least discuss your situation with a defense attorney before you plead guilty to any crime. We offer free consultations for anyone accused of a crime in Maine. But if you need your driver’s license or you need to avoid a drunk driving conviction, you should consider hiring an O.U.I. defense attorney.