Being charged with driving while intoxicated is a scary experience. California law increases the consequences of a crash that injures another person. Driving while under the influence of alcohol or drugs and causing injury, a violation of Vehicle Code § 23153 (CVC § 23153), is a serious crime that can be charged as a misdemeanor or felony.
Los Angeles prosecutors will have to prove that you were driving while intoxicated or in violation of another traffic law or in a negligent manner and that you caused the accident that directly resulted in harm to another person. Convictions have harsh consequences, including jail time, fines, restitution, and extended license revocation. Defensive or aggressive legal defenses are necessary when freedom is at stake. Leah Legal Criminal Defense Attorney’s defense team is ready to investigate your case and to fight for your rights. Part of this commitment is to provide the following information to help you better understand the offense.
Understanding DUI Causing Injury as Addressed Under Vehicle Code § 23153
Driving under the influence is a very serious offense. When a collision results in injury, the legal damages increase. Under CVC § 23153, you cannot drive while under the influence and simultaneously commit an unlawful act or fail to perform a legal duty that directly causes bodily injury to someone else.
The law is meant to punish bad driving, but often targets motorists who are not responsible for the crash. To obtain a conviction, prosecutors must prove all the elements of the statutes beyond a reasonable doubt.
The state has to find you impaired under one of several specific statutory subsections to secure your conviction under CVC § 23153:
- CVC § 23153(a) — This law prohibits operating a motor vehicle in any condition of drunkenness. Driving while impaired will result in you driving without exercising the caution of a sober person using ordinary care as required by the law
- CVC § 23153(b) — Driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol at a BAC of 0.08% or higher and engaging in an unlawful act. Furthermore, it is also a crime when you drive with these levels of alcohol in your system, concurrently commit a crime, or neglect to perform a legal duty, and your actions result in a crash that results in another person’s injury. Under this subdivision, a rebuttable presumption exists that you had 0.08 percent or more of alcohol in your blood at the time of driving if a chemical test taken within three hours after driving shows a level of 0.08% or higher.
- CVC § 23153(d) — Sets a lower blood alcohol concentration of 0.04% or above, by weight, for commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers as defined in CVC § 15210.
- CVC § 23153(f) — Prohibits driving while impaired by any drug, prescription drug, or over-the-counter drug; makes it illegal to drive while intoxicated by drugs, prescription drugs, or over-the-counter drugs
To secure a standard DUI under CVC § 23152, it is only necessary that you were driving while you were impaired. Just a DUI causing injury charge under CVC § 23153 is not enough. It does not have to be proven that any particular section of the Vehicle Code has been breached to establish that you neglected any duty imposed by said law in your operation of the vehicle; ordinary civil or criminal negligence in the operation of the vehicle is sufficient.
Importantly, that particular violation or negligence must be the “substantial factor” and the “proximate cause” of the injured party’s injury. If you were intoxicated, but another driver broke a law, for example, running a red light, and collided with you, the accident was not your fault. Prosecutors often exaggerate the facts of causation, making a targeted legal defense necessary.
Misdemeanor Versus Felony Charges
CVC § 23153 is considered a “wobbler” offense, which means the prosecuting attorney has the discretion to charge the offense either as a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the circumstances of the case, the severity of the injuries sustained, and the criminal history.
If the state prosecutes your case as a misdemeanor, a conviction will likely result in the following penalties:
- Summary probation for three to five years
- County jail time, from 5 days to one year
- Fines ranging from $390 to $5,000
- A court-ordered alcohol or drug education program of at least three months or up to thirty months
- Complete compensation for all damages
- Suspension of driver’s license, 1 to 3 years
Some cases are automatically considered “felony” cases. When there are 3 or more convictions for driving while intoxicated within 10 years, the next driving while intoxicated conviction with injury is a felony.
The statutory penalties for a felony conviction under CVC § 23566 are very harsh. They include the following:
- State prison terms of 16 months, two years, or three years under Penal Code § 1170(h) (or up to four years for prior enhancement triggers)
- Fines ranging from $1,015 to $5,000
- Five-year driver’s license revocation
- Three-year designation as a Habitual Traffic Offender (HTO)
Penal Code § 12022.7 provides a Great Bodily Injury (GBI) enhancement if a victim sustains a serious physical injury. This enhancement imposes another consecutive three- to six-year term in state prison.
A great bodily injury enhancement is part of California’s Three Strikes Law (Penal Code §667(b–(i) and Penal Code §1170.12) and is a violent “strike.” Receiving a GBI enhancement carries consequences that extend far beyond your immediate prison term:
- Permanent record — Once you receive a GBI, it stays on your record forever. If you are charged with a felony later in life, you will be given a double sentence if this DUI Causing Injury offense conviction resulted in your first strike
- Mandatory state prison — Strikeable offenses, do away with probation, diversion, or county jail time. You must complete your sentence in state prison.
- Loss of good conduct credits — Standard felony offenders can reduce their served time by 50% by good conduct. A GBI violent strike places a cap of 15% good conduct credits, requiring you to spend 85% of the entire court-ordered sentence incarcerated. Under California’s three-strikes law, if you rack up a few strikes and are charged with a serious or violent felony in the future, you are at greater risk of being sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Strategic Legal Defenses to Challenge DUI Causing Injury Charges
A proactive and targeted approach is needed when charged with DUI causing injury. The ideal defenses challenge chemical test accuracy, establish a lack of driver fault, or contest proximate causation. Some of the common defenses include the following:
Contesting Identity and Impairment
At chaotic crash scenes, police officers often make hasty assumptions about the driver. If more than one person was in your vehicle, then the state must establish by a preponderance of evidence that you were operating the vehicle.
Moreover, any physical changes, for example, bloodshot eyes or slurred speech, are not indicative of chemical intoxication. Stressful events, medical symptoms, and injuries from the accident may present similar symptoms to impairment.
Moreover, blood or breath tests hours after the accident cannot accurately measure your chemical level at the time of the crash. Alcohol is continually metabolized over time, and the level of alcohol in the blood (BAC) will fluctuate after you stop driving. Alcohol consumption could have been low immediately before your driving and only increased during questioning by law enforcement or during a breath test. Prosecutors often use a mathematical technique called retrograde extrapolation to calculate hypothetical BAC levels. It assumes some general biological parameters, rather than using specific parameters for the person who was tested. How quickly the alcohol gets into the bloodstream depends on other factors, like what people had eaten just before drinking, how stressed they are, and their metabolism. Chemical tests taken well after the accident will not definitively determine whether you were intoxicated when you were driving.
Disputing Causation
The state will have to show that the crash was directly caused by your driving. If someone else’s negligence, weather, or equipment failure, for example, played a part in the accident, you are not at fault under CVC § 23153. Defense attorneys collaborate with accident reconstruction specialists to analyze skid marks, vehicle telemetry, and video to establish who was actually at fault.
To prove a case of DUI causing injury, as outlined in Vehicle Code § 23153, prosecutors must prove that you were guilty of an illegal act or negligent driving maneuver and that the illegal act or negligent driving maneuver resulted in the injury. If another motorist ran a red light, swerved unexpectedly, or violated traffic laws, simply being intoxicated at the scene of a crash is not enough for a conviction. If a hazardous black ice, uncalibrated traffic signals, or other intervening cause (like a sudden mechanical failure, like brake loss) occurs, the legal chain of causation can be completely severed. Felony injury enhancements will not hold up if the state cannot prove that your actions were the immediate cause of the victim’s injuries.
Successfully proving third-party negligence or outside environmental conditions caused the accident allows your defense attorney to question the initial charges and force the state to dismiss the injury allegations or reduce the case to a standard non-injury misdemeanor.
Challenging Chemical Tests and Title 17 Regulations
State agencies carefully monitor blood and breath testing. Forensic laboratories must follow strict protocols established by the California Code of Regulations Title 17 for the collection, handling, storage, and analysis of blood and breath samples.
Breath-testing devices must be strictly calibrated and properly maintained with a maintenance record, and breath samples must be obtained from alveolar lung air (not from mouth air containing alcohol, which can falsely indicate a positive result due to GERD or acid reflux). For blood sampling, not using non-alcoholic sterilizing agents or using agents that are not appropriate for the method of preservation can compromise test results, providing a good reason to suppress them.
In addition, to avoid fermentation, blood samples must be chemically preserved and kept refrigerated at all times. Technicians can also introduce insufficient amounts of the sodium fluoride preservative or the potassium oxalate anticoagulant, allowing microorganisms to grow within the vial, which will result in an “inflated” blood alcohol concentration (BAC) due to the natural production of ethanol by the microorganisms after the draw.
Furthermore, blood samples require precise chemical preservation and continuous refrigeration to prevent fermentation. If a gap in the logbook is not recorded, the temperature is not recorded accurately throughout the transportation process, or there are no logbook entries, the specimen is at risk of degradation or mislabeling. These flaws are used by defense teams in motions to suppress tainted blood and breath samples. Exposing Title 17 violations directly undermines the prosecution’s scientific basis and can lead to suppression of chemical evidence and to a failure to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
How to Protect Your Driving Privileges
When an individual is arrested for a DUI, he/she has two separate legal battles to face:
- The criminal case
- The case before the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is responsible for the administrative driver’s license suspension
Your physical driver’s license is then seized upon your arrest, and a temporary driver’s license is given, which only lasts for 30 days.
CVC § 13558 gives you 10 calendar days after receiving a suspension notice to file a written request for a DMV administrative hearing. If you do not request this hearing within this time period, it will result in an automatic administrative suspension. Having legal representation on call will ensure that this is done in a timely fashion.
While the California DMV imposes severe penalties on alcohol-related offenders behind the wheel, the statutory regulations allow drivers to retain their driving privileges by installing an Ignition Interlock Device (IID) in accordance with CVC § 23575. Instead of an absolute ban on driving, the laws generally allow qualified persons to drive a motor vehicle without being subject to the ban, so long as they meet an IID. This breath-analysis unit must show a zero BAC reading for the vehicle to start.
The Arraignment and Preliminary Hearing in a CVC § 23153 Case
An arraignment is the first step in the criminal court system. The arraignment will be scheduled within days or weeks of your arrest. At this hearing, the judge reads the formal criminal charges against you charged by the District Attorney’s office, explains your constitutional rights, and asks how you plead.
Avoid entering a ‘guilty’ plea during an arraignment without consulting an attorney. Your attorney will file a “Not Guilty” plea on your behalf. This initial move is not an automatic path to an adversarial jury trial, but it gives your attorney time to obtain police reports, review police body-worn camera footage, examine accident diagrams, and review chemical test results.
If the District Attorney files your CVC § 23153 case as a felony, you have a right to a preliminary hearing. This is a mini-trial in which the prosecutor has to provide sufficient evidence to a judge that there is probable cause that you committed the crime.
Your defense attorney can use the preliminary hearing to your distinct advantage by:
- Cross-examining the arresting officers and eyewitnesses under oath
- Exposing inconsistencies or procedural mistakes in the police report
- Testing the strength of the state’s evidence before trial
- Arguing to the judge that the felony charge lacks sufficient evidence and should be reduced to a misdemeanor
If the judge agrees with your defense attorney, the felony charge will be downgraded to a misdemeanor, and your maximum prison time will be cut down from felony to misdemeanor, and you will have no strike marks.
Chemical Test Refusals and Mandatory Blood Warrants
California’s implied consent laws state that if you are lawfully arrested for driving while impaired, you are automatically consenting to submit to a chemical blood or breath test. Officers are very serious about this obligation when an accident results in injuries.
A chemical test refusal after a regular DUI stop would result in a one-year driver’s license suspension and require jail enhancements at conviction. However, when an injury occurs, police officers do not simply accept a refusal.
Law enforcement will not be hesitant to obtain a telephonic search warrant if they ask you to submit to a breath or blood test after your crash caused someone to be injured. Police can contact an on-call judge and present an affidavit on a computer under oath that they believe you were intoxicated while driving, and get the judge’s permission to take your blood.
Your blood will be taken without your consent, and possibly with restraints if necessary. Although motions to challenge a search warrant exist, an experienced attorney can review whether the warrant had the requisite probable cause or whether the blood draw itself complied with medical hygiene standards.
How Drug Impairment Can Lead to a DUI Injury Charge
Many motorists think that driving under the influence can only be caused by illegal street drugs or alcohol. Prescription medications, medical marijuana, and even some over-the-counter cold and allergy medications can result in a CVC § 23153 charge if an accident occurs while driving while intoxicated.
Drivers who pass a breath test with no alcohol in their system are often arrested when they appear to be disoriented or fatigued. When officers suspect a person is impaired by drugs, they may contact a Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) to perform a twelve-step evaluation.
The DRE process includes:
- Checking your pulse
- Examining your pupils in various lighting conditions
- Assessing the tone of your muscles
- Having you perform some physical coordination tests
Police departments consider DRE testimony highly scientific, while independent medical and legal experts are highly skeptical of the evaluations.
A DRE is a police officer, not a medical doctor. Assessments tend to be subjective and can be swayed by confirmation bias. Many factors, such as fatigue, anxiety after a car accident, chronic pain, neurological disorders, and natural physical differences, can produce the same symptoms that a DRE is monitoring. Your attorney can present independent medical evidence to establish that you were not impaired by drugs during the crash and can question the qualifications of the DRE.
How Pre-Filing Intervention Can Prevent or Reduce DUI Charges
One of the most effective tactics that an aggressive defense lawyer can use is before your first court appearance. This is known as pre-filing intervention.
Police detain you and submit their investigative reports to the local district attorney. The filing prosecutor then reviews the file to decide whether to file the case and whether to charge it as a misdemeanor or a felony.
This is a critical timeframe, from arrest to the filing of formal charges. Your lawyer can act proactively by reaching out to the prosecutor who will file the charges and by providing a defense package designed to mitigate them.
Having a robust pre-filing mitigation package gives prosecutors the whole picture of you and spares them from relying on a biased police report. This package can include:
- Employer, family, and community letters of reference
- Proof of alcohol education and counseling participation
- Medical records that provide an explanation of the physical condition that contributed to the symptoms of the accident
- Payment of victim restitution early to show that you are taking responsibility and that you show remorse
- Alternative accident reconstruction reports indicate that another driver is responsible for the accident
An experienced attorney will present this evidence early on and may convince the district attorney to consider dropping the case to a misdemeanor charge or, in rare instances, even dismissing the case entirely.
Find a Professional Criminal Defense Lawyer Near Me
Navigating a serious criminal allegation demands an effective, aggressive legal approach. Being convicted of a violation of Vehicle Code § 23153 can affect your life and freedom, and your record will never be the same. Thankfully, being charged with these offenses does not preclude you from having legal recourse. An experienced defense attorney can question the validity of chemical testing, dispute the element of causation, and guard your constitutional rights at all stages of the judicial process. Early intervention by a qualified legal professional can make the difference in reducing the charges or ultimately dismissing the case, all while ensuring your case achieves the most favorable possible outcome.
Do not leave your future to chance when facing severe allegations in Los Angeles. Call the experienced team at Leah Legal Criminal Defense Attorney right away to arrange your initial consultation. Call us today at 213-444-7818 and have an experienced and aggressive criminal defense attorney represent you.
