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Note About Your Driver's License and To preserve your right to drive in Texas, you must request a hearing within 15 days of the date you were served with a Notice of Suspension. In most cases, this is the day of your arrest. If you timely requested a hearing to contest your license suspension, you will be able to continue to drive unless an Administrative Law Judge rules against you and authorizes the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to suspend your driver's license. If you lose at the hearing, your driver's license will be suspended and you cannot drive unless you obtain an occupational driver's license. In some cases, the suspension may be stayed (temporarily prevented) by the filing of an appeal. It is our opinion you should always request a hearing. Information can be learned, through the Administrative License Revocation process, which can be vital to your defense of your DWI. If your license is suspended at the hearing, you may be able to secure an occupational license to drive. Contrary to what you will have been led to believe by the officer who arrested you, suspension of your driver's license is not automatic. There are a number of ways to potentially avoid and prevent a suspension. There are a variety of circumstances when suspension do not occur. Of course, if you fail to request a hearing by the 15th day after your arrest, suspension will be automatic. At the ALR hearing, the Texas Department of Public Safety must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that: (1) there was a sufficient legal basis to initially stop you (That is, reasonable suspicion to believe you had committed or were committing a crime); (2) there was sufficient legal basis to arrest you for DWI (that is, probable cause to believe you were DWI; and (3) either that you were validly offered and refused to provide a specimen for a breath or blood test or that you provided a specimen of breath or blood and the result exceeded the legal limit of .08 at the time you were driving. These issues provide a variety of ways potentially to prevent you from losing your driver's license. Since the ALR process also includes some discovery and may involve a hearing at which one or more officers will testify, your lawyer may learn things that will help win both the ALR proceeding and the DWI case. Any
person or lawyer who tells you that you should not worry about or pursue
the ALR process is likely not knowledgeable about or competent at
defending DWI cases. Schneider & McKinney, P.C.
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