Fresno DUI Case Dismissed for Failure to Prosecute

Not too long long ago, a friend of mine came to me here in Fresno after seeing my picture in the yellow pages. He didn't realize I was a Fresno DUI attorney and after he recognized my picture from the phone book he called me up. It turned out he had a case from 2004 that he hadn't dealt with and now was coming up to bite him in the- you know what. He told me his public defender told him that if he pled to a DUI that the DA would drop the rest of the charges (under the influence of narcotics, possession of a smoking device, suspended license, no registration, etc.) He couldn’t do that because it would have ruined his chance to get a promising job where he needed a clean driving record.

Well, I told him, lets check some things out first before you do that. The first call I made was to the lab that had his blood (since this was a blood test case). Well, of course, the blood was destroyed since the case was several years old. The next call I made was to the evidence room at the police department. Well it turned out the evidence had been destroyed in 2005 (the smoking device.) This to me presented a great example of why someone should get a competent Fresno DUI Lawyer to defend their case. His court appointed attorney, unfortunately, had not even checked to see if the evidence still existed or, worse yet, if they had, he or she was deliberately withholding this information from my friend.

After I told my friend the news and said that it looked like he had a pretty good shot at fighting this case, he decided to hire me. Well I spent a weekend drafting three motions (a motion to dismiss for failure to prosecute the case in a timely manner, a motion to dismiss for destruction of evidence, and a motion to suppress the evidence in the case based on a questionable police stop.) The next week I calendared all three motions to be heard with the court.

After that I subpoened the director of the laboratory that destroyed my client's blood sample and the detective in charge of the evidence room where the smoking device was destroyed. I'd like to add (off topic) that issuing subpoenas is probably my favorite part of being a lawyer. Sometimes I think I would have gone to law school just for the pleasure of dragging unwilling people into court.

Low and behold, we finally got into court and had all motions heard a couple of weeks ago. The court took up my first motion, the motion to dismiss for failure to prosecute in a timely manner. Since the evidence had been destroyed, and it was irrefutable that my client was within access of the prosecution so that they could have prosecuted this case prior to the destruction of the evidence, the court granted my first motion without even considering the other two motions and dismissed my friend’s case.

It turned out that I put in all that extra work for nothing. If the court would have told me in advance I’d win based on the first motion I never would have written the other two. But I think the others might have done the trick as well. Needless to say, my friend was one happy camper.