Drink driving
Winning your trial - drink driving defences
Our solicitors like to win the drink driving trials they run, so we approach each case with a view to winning it. Our drink driving solicitors do this by looking first to see how they can undermine the prosecution's evidence of you drink driving and then they move on to consider whether there are drink driving defences that might assist you.
Undermining the prosecution
In drink driving cases our solicitors look to ensure that the police have conducted themselves properly. There are some irregularities that our solicitors know will always cause a drink driving prosecution to fail, some where the irregularity makes no difference and a handful where there is a grey area.
Our solicitors will examine your case to provide you with quality analysis of the evidence against you and how it can be beaten. Once the prosecution case has been undermined they will be unable to go on with the prosecution, which means that you win your drink driving trial!
Drink driving defences
There are two types of defence to drink driving. Those are general defences that you can rely upon for any criminal trial and defences that are specific to drink driving trials.
The best known drink driving defence is the "hip flask" defence. Quite simply this means that you are not guilty because you drank after you stopped driving - it is called the hip flask defence because people used to claim they drank from their hip flask following an accident to explain why they were drunk. In all but a handful of cases, the court will expect to hear expert evidence from a drink driving medical expert on what your blood alcohol level would have been but for the post-driving consumption. This is something we can arrange for you - if the expert gives evidence in court then his fees will be paid by the court regardless of the outcome of the case!
In some scenarios you will be saying that you were drink driving because of some threat to you. In a recent case, our solicitors successfully argued that a client was not guilty of drink driving despite being drunk and driving on a public road because she had been attacked and had no choice but to drive to escape her attacker. This is called duress and can be a very effective drink driving defence.
There are many other drink driving defences that can be used to win your drink driving trial. Call us to discuss the right tactics for you.
You can find out about the sentencing for drink driving or find out more about the offence of drink driving and how the police will try to prove it against you.
Find out more
Follow the links below to find out about defences to drink driving allegations and the sentence you are likely to receive if convicted of drink driving.
2. Sentences for drink driving
What should I do now?
Being accused of a criminal offence is a stressful time and you may think that it's impossible to defend yourself or save your driving licence. We can review the case against you and give you our expert opinion on the strength of the evidence against, errors made by the prosecution, possible tactics to have prosecution evidence excluded, defences available and whether you can avoid penalty points if convicted. In 99.99% of cases we can provide this review quickly and cheaply so you can decide what to do once you have the full facts and not just the police's version.
You are also welcome to call us and speak with an experienced solicitor about your case for some preliminary advice. Although your solicitor can only give basic advice on the telephone based on what you say you will get an idea of what can be done. There's nothing to pay until you decide to instruct us, so if you decide not to instruct as after speaking on the telephone then it won't cost you a penny.
Feel free to give us a call now on 020 8242 4440 To discuss your options. Or you can send an email via our contact us page.