According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Texas Department of Public Safety recently announced that troopers made more than 1,000 DWI arrests during a special spring break enforcement period. These 1,000 arrests all occurred between March 8 through March 17.

Our Texas DWI lawyers know that a spring break arrest for DWI can have far reaching consequences that affect you even after your vacation has ended and you have returned home. It is important to understand the legal implications of being arrested while on spring break or on any vacation.

What Happens When You Are Arrested on Vacation?

If you were visiting Texas for spring break or for any other reason and you were arrested for drunk driving in the state, you cannot just go back to your own home and forget about what happened. If your license is suspended in Texas as a result of a DWI arrest, your own state will find out about this and will suspend your license there as well.  This means that you would be unable to drive legally in your own home state even though the DWI arrest was in Texas.

You will also need to deal with the criminal charges that you face. When you are arrested for drunk driving, you need to come to hearings, you need to enter a plea and you need to resolve your case. This can be done through a plea bargain or through a trial.  You can also try to convince the court and prosecutor to drop the charges, or you can explore diversion programs that allow first-time offenders to avoid a criminal conviction and record.

To pursue any of the options related to your case, however, you’ll be dealing with Texas courts and Texas prosecutors. This can be hard to do when you are back home and far away from Texas where you were on vacation.

As such, it is very important that you have a local attorney representing you in the state of Texas even after you have gone back home. Your attorney can handle many of the issues locally, minimizing the number of times that you need to come back to Texas to deal with the charges against you. In fact, you may not need to return at all.

Spring Break Arrests

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that law enforcement had special DWI patrols working over spring break because the police know that Texas is a popular spring break destination. The troopers estimate that 226 of the 1,077 DWI arrests that were made were the result of the increased patrols over the vacation period.

Unfortunately, with police aggressively searching for drunk drivers during this period, it is possible that some of the arrests that were made were borderline cases where there is only minimal evidence showing that the driver was intoxicated. The increased patrols and the strong focus on finding drunk drivers may have also led to police pulling over drivers even in cases where there was dubious probable cause.

Understanding your legal rights, as well as understanding the implications of being arrested while on vacation, is very important to protect yourself as you cope with the criminal charges.

You need an experienced, aggressive Texas DWI lawyer.  Call 1-800-395-5951 today for your free consultation. More than 20 years experience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 23rd, 2013 at 9:09 am and is filed under Drunk Driving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.