Our Approach to Driving While Suspended Charges in DC
At our firm we realize that every client comes with a new set of challenges and individual circumstances that must be properly analyzed and responded to with skill and professionalism. Every suspended license case in DC differs in some fashion which makes it important that your legal representation is taking the time and effort to learn the specific set of facts and circumstances surrounding your case.
The following is information on driving while suspended charges in Washington, DC.
Most Challenging Aspects of Driving While Suspended Cases
In some situations, people have suspended licenses for large number of outstanding unpaid tickets and sometimes they may not even be in a position to get their driver’s license reinstated for many months or maybe even years. In those situations, it can sometimes be a little more difficult to work out resolutions with the prosecutors, but we want to take into account the client’s situation and use every resource that we have available to us to try and get a good result regardless of the reason why a person’s license may have been suspended in the first place.
Criminal and DMV Charges and Penalties
If you’re caught driving while your license is suspended, you can be arrested and charged with a criminal offense, and that means that you would appear in the same court as people being charged with driving under the influence or leaving after colliding—not just a DMV adjudication hearing. However, along with the criminal side of the case, you can also face additional DMV penalties.
First and Subsequent Charges
Fortunately, if you never received a charge of driving while suspended before, then the prosecutors may give you the option of doing a diversion program where you simply have to fix your license suspension in order to get your charges dismissed. As an example, some people may have gotten their license suspended because they had a traffic ticket that they forgot to pay. In those situations, it’s very easy to fix your license: all you need to do is pay the ticket, pay a reinstatement fee and the DMV will remove the suspension from your license. In those situations where you’ve never been arrested before for driving on a suspended license, it can potentially be a simple matter of your lawyer negotiating an agreement with the prosecutors to allow you to fix the license in exchange for a dismissal. However, if you start racking up more than one driving on a suspended license charge, then the prosecutors will be increasingly harsh and potentially at one point may even begin asking that you serve jail time.
Why Do Clients Choose to Work With Us?
Many of our clients are people who have not been in trouble in the past and are facing criminal charges for the first time. What people in that situation are looking for is a person who is not going to simply dismiss their concerns as being trivial because it’s a low level case. They look for a lawyer who empathizes with their situation, understands that while it may not be the most serious crime in the world, for a person who’s facing it for the first time it can be the most serious thing that they’d ever had to go through. And I think a lot of people are looking for a lawyer who understands that, understands their concerns and empathizes with those concerns. And that’s something that we do. Even though our firm deals with sex assault, burglary, gun charges, drug cases, when a client is dealing with a driving while suspended charge, then that’s a serious charge for them, and we treat it as such.