DWI & DUI

What is a DWI? 

Driving While Intoxicated refers to driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, which is a misdemeanor or felony crime in the state of Texas. A DWI arrest can be one of life’s most frightening experiences. Not only are you usually subjected to a night in jail, but your driver’s license is confiscated and replaced with a confusing piece of paper titled “Temporary Driving Permit,” accompanied by a court date on the criminal charge. After a DWI charge in Austin, many people wonder if their life will ever regain a degree of normalcy.

What is a DUI?

DUI stands for Driving Under the Influence. Because some states use that term instead of DWI, people often use DWI and DUI interchangeably. However, in Texas, DWI -- Driving While Intoxicated -- is the technical name of the crime.

How DWI defense attorney Chris Perri can help:

An award-winning DWI lawyer in Austin, Chris Perri will fight to protect your future. He’ll help by listening to your side of the story with a compassionate ear, navigating you through the confusing legal process, and developing zealous defense strategies specific to your situation.  

In dealing with your case, his first step will be to contest your license suspension so you can drive legally without fear of another arrest. The quicker you hire a criminal defense attorney, the faster (and cheaper) the process of driving legally again will be. 

Chris Perri will then turn to mounting an aggressive defense and assessing your best options. By demonstrating weaknesses in the prosecution's cases, he has successfully persuaded prosecutors to reduce and dismiss countless clients’ DWI charges without the stress of a jury trial. And if the prosecutor won’t dismiss the charge, he is prepared to take your case to the jury--where he's won at trial time and time again.

Chris Perri will examine if your DWI arrest was fair in the first place.

When examining a case, a question that often comes up is whether the police had probable cause to pull someone over in the first place. Unless the officer observed a driver committing an actual traffic offense, Chris Perri may have grounds to suppress any evidence of the alleged intoxication.

BAC machines are often not reliable.

It is also very common for people to provide the police with a breath sample on the less-than-reliable intoxilyzer. Even if your breath test shows a blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) above the legal limit, Chris Perri can demonstrate to the jury that the machine is not scientifically reliable. For example, the intoxilyzer assumes that every person has the population’s average blood/breath ratio of 2100/1 (2100 parts of alcohol in the blood for every 1 part of alcohol in the breath). The machine multiplies each part of alcohol in the breath by 2100 in order to estimate the amount of alcohol in the blood. However, if a person only has a 1500/1 blood/breath ratio, that person is unfairly prejudiced, because the machine will estimate a BAC as high as .12 when their BAC is actually .07. DWI attorney Chris Perri can use all of this technical information to build a persuasive defense.