Oklahoma DUI News

What are factors that can influence a sentence for DUI? Much of the discussion you can find about the offense of drunk driving concerns issues like the legal grounds upon which a police officer might pull you over, or the types of field sobriety tests you may be subject to, or possible approaches to take when negotiating with a district attorney. But what happens if your case goes to trial, and a jury finds you guilty of DUI? Is there ... Read More »

The basic idea behind low-carb dieting is simple: by denying the body a food supply of carbohydrates to convert into energy, you can force it to burn its fat reserves instead through a process known as “ketosis.” Research suggests that this may be a mixed blessing, however, if you should ever find yourself the subject of a breathalyzer test. How can a low-carb diet trigger a false positive? To understand how ketosis can contribute to skewed breath test readings for ... Read More »

Are you a Pilot? If so, here are some DUI considerations you should know about. Being a licensed pilot means that you are qualified to operate two kinds of motor vehicles: those confined to the ground, and aircraft. Under ordinary circumstances you can consider these two forms of transportation to be separate realms, but there is one aspect in which they can intersect and not in a good way: if you run afoul of drunk driving laws, in Oklahoma or ... Read More »

If you are charged in Oklahoma for having committed a crime that resulted in the death of someone, under the legal definition of homicide you can find yourself being prosecuted along two basic paths: intentional homicide (that is, murder), or negligent homicide, which is also known as manslaughter. If the death of the other person was in connection with your driving of a vehicle while you were allegedly intoxicated, this situation will almost invariably take you down the manslaughter path ... Read More »

What is a “sniffer”? Should I be worried about it? We have addressed in a variety of ways the subject of how police officers make their decisions on whether to pull a driver over based on reasonable suspicion of drunk driving, and how once that takes place they interact with the driver to make a follow-up determination of whether to have the driver take field sobriety tests and a pre-arrest blood alcohol test. The intermediate stage of this process — ... Read More »

Cleveland County, Oklahoma Pilots Program to Reduce Repeat DUI Offenses It has been well-known for many years not only in Oklahoma but throughout the United States that drunk driving offenders have a high recidivism rate. Many states have tried various approaches to reduce the incidence of repeat DUI offenses, with varying degrees of success. According to Erik Smoot, a representative of the Oklahoma Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement (ABLE) Commission, Oklahoma has been possibly the least successful state-level jurisdiction in the ... Read More »

A new formulation of alcohol in powdered form has apparently been approved by the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. What this will mean when it comes to state laws governing driving while under the influence of alcohol remains to be fully understood, but some states are already enacting legislation to restrict or even to prohibit the sale of the new product. The inventor of the new product has named it “Palcohol.” The formulation for how it is ... Read More »

What is the significance of blood alcohol concentration levels? Blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) levels are one of the most widely recognized means of determining whether a driver is under the influence of alcohol, particularly the .08% level which is used in Oklahoma as the threshold for police to make an arrest for DUI. But what is the significance of the various BAC levels? Aside from the .08% legal context, what is the difference between a .05% and .10%? The effects of ... Read More »

Oklahoma Senate passes own version of anti-texting bill Texting and driving is demonstrably one of the most dangerous and potentially deadly forms of distracted driving. The seriousness of the problem lies in the readily available year-on-year statistics: almost one-third of drivers admit to texting while driving, and nationally in 2012 alone more than 3,000 deaths and more than 40,000 injuries were attributable to distracted driving. In Oklahoma an estimated 10 or more fatal accidents involving drivers distracted by electronic devices ... Read More »

Conviction based on a violation of Oklahoma’s DUI laws carries with it a number of penalties, which vary in severity based on factors such as whether the conviction is for a first-time or subsequent offense or the degree of intoxication. Penalties can include sanctions like fines, community service, jail time, or the requirement to have an ignition interlock device installed in his or her vehicle. The home page of our Oklahoma DUI Defense website contains the text of the law ... Read More »