What Does the Prosecution Need to Prove in These Types of Cases? Are They Particularly Difficult to Prove?
Prescription medication and drug DUI cases are very different for a prosecutor to prove in court than an alcohol DUI. Everybody knows with an alcohol DUI, you should not drive with a 0.08 blood alcohol concentration or above. It’s very easy to look at a number on a breath test machine or a blood test result and say that the person is above the legal limit.
In California, when dealing with medication, there are no specific limits to say someone has a certain amount of drugs in their system, so therefore they are impaired. What the prosecutor has to prove is that the person was impaired and could not drive similarly to a sober person. Moreover, there are no specific numbers for the prosecutor to look at or to use or to try to convince the jury. You can get nanograms per milliliter in the blood and show that evidence but converting that to impairment is a very different story.
Prosecutors would have to look more at driving and field sobriety tests in these cases. When prosecutors are confronted with a skilled defense attorney, they will soon realize that they are not able to correlate field sobriety tests to impairment from drugs. That’s not what the field sobriety tests were designed for and they are not effective in doing that.
Therefore, a DUI drug case is far more difficult for a prosecutor to convince a jury to convict than alcohol, especially when confronted with an experienced defense attorney. It’s also important to know that there is not the same stigma with drugs and prescription medication as there is with alcohol.
Everybody knows you shouldn’t drink and drive but if you are under a doctor’s care and taking prescribed medication at a therapeutic dose, people understand that there are medical reasons for that. There is no bias against somebody who is taking prescription medication and driving, like someone who is taking alcohol or illegal drugs.
Are These Cases Easier to Defend Than a DUI Stemming from Alcohol Use?
Depending on the circumstances, prescription medication cases can be much easier to defend than alcohol DUI cases because of political reasons, personal reasons and through the state of the technology and the science. There is a lot more research that’s been done on alcohol than on various types of drugs and driving.
For more information about defending your case, call the law office of Attorney Mark Rosenfeld for a free initial consultation at (310) 424-3145 and get the information and legal answers you’re seeking.
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