DC DUI Drug Defense Strategies
Driving under the influence of drugs is a serious charge that often involves serious consequences such as fines and jail time. With this in mind here is information on the most common defense strategies used for drug DUI cases. To find out more about defense or develop the defense that’s best for your case call a DC DUI drug lawyer today.
Common Defenses for Drug DUI Charges
Below, DC DUI lawyer Peter Odom discusses various defenses that may be available to those individual charged with driving under the influence of drugs.
Questioning the Prosecution’s Evidence
The most common defense that we explore when someone’s accused of driving under the influence of drugs is what evidence is present to prove that a person was under the influence of the drug at the time that they were driving the car. So in the event that a person provides a sample of their urine or a sample of their blood and those samples are tested and they come back positive for say cocaine. Cocaine can be in the person’s system for several days either in their blood stream or in their urine for several days before it is filtered out. That means that a person who is driving the car and say gets pulled over for a traffic violation and is suspected of being under the influence of cocaine can give a urine sample that comes back positive for cocaine even though the person hadn’t actually consumed cocaine for several days.
The person will still test positive but at the time that they were driving the person actually wasn’t under the influence at that time. They may have failed field sobriety test for some reason, maybe they have poor balance inherently or maybe they are overweight and don’t have the ability to be able to complete a field sobriety test, there could be any number of reasons why they’d be unable to complete a field sobriety test. But it could still suggest to a police officer that that person is under the influence of some substance outside of alcohol. So that person then gets arrested and we’re in the position then of challenging the allegation of the prosecutor that all these problems with the person’s field sobriety test or any other evidence that the prosecutor plans on using is the result of that client’s consumption of cocaine.
Other Defenses
We can look to evidence that a person wasn’t under the influence at that time. We can look to the lack of any cocaine being in the car. Any number of things that could challenge the government’s allegation that at the time the person was driving the drug was having no impact on their cognitive skills or motor skills. We can also look to challenging whether or not the urine test was conducted properly, we can look to whether or not a person’s medication may have come up with a false positive result for a different drug and if that false positive makes the difference between a positive test for a schedule 1 drug or a positive test for a non-schedule 1 drug. That can make the difference between mandatory jail time and no jail time.