Our Athens DUI Office: What Happens After an Athens-Clarke County DUI Arrest

Our firm now has an Athens office. Kohn & Yager, LLC has opened at 320 East Clayton Street, Suite 435, Athens, GA 30601, a walk of about 200 yards from the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse. Cory Yager, Attorney at Law, is the attorney working from that office. William C. “Bubba” Head, who handled his first Athens DUI case in January of 1977 and has defended drivers in Athens-Clarke County ever since, remains with the firm in an advisory capacity.

This page is not another overview of Georgia drunk driving law. It follows one Athens DUI case forward in time: the paperwork handed over at the roadside, the deadline that expires before the first court date, the courtroom the case lands in, and the sentence at the end of it. Every figure below is the one the Georgia statute prints.

Why an Office 200 Yards From the Courthouse Matters

Athens, Georgia is a college town with a courthouse at the center of it. The University of Georgia brings tens of thousands of students and staff into a county of roughly 125,000 people, and football weekends bring extra patrols on top of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department. The result is a steady volume of impaired driving arrests in a small downtown footprint.

An office two blocks from that courthouse is not a marketing detail. Calendar calls are early, discovery is often exchanged in person with the solicitor-general’s office, and a reset hearing is a walk rather than a drive back from Atlanta.

The Thirty-Day License Clock Starts at the Arrest

The most frequent way an Athens DUI case goes wrong has nothing to do with the criminal charge at all. It is a missed paperwork deadline, and it runs out weeks before the first court appearance.

At a DUI arrest the officer may hand the driver a notice that the license is suspended. That happens when a chemical test is refused. It also happens when a test result comes back at or above the legal threshold. The clock starts on the day that notice is served in person. It starts on the day it is received when it comes by certified mail or statutory overnight delivery.

From that day there are 30 days to send a $150.00 filing fee to the Department of Driver Services. The fee has to travel with a written request for an administrative license suspension hearing. Miss it, and the right to that hearing is deemed waived. Nothing about the criminal charge changes that, because the two cases run on separate tracks. Once the request is filed, the Department must hold the hearing within 30 days. The hearing officer then sends a decision to sustain or rescind the suspension within five calendar days.

The hearing is worth requesting because its scope is narrow and entirely factual. A short list of questions is on the table. Did the officer have reasonable grounds to believe the driver was in actual physical control of a moving vehicle while under the influence, and was the arrest lawful? Or was the driver in a crash causing serious injury or a death? Was the implied consent notice read when the test was asked for, including what happens on a refusal? Did the driver refuse, or blow 0.08 grams or more (0.02 under 21, 0.04 in a commercial vehicle)? Was the test given by a person holding a valid permit from the GBI Division of Forensic Sciences? Was the machine an approved one, with every part attached and in good working order? Each of those can be tested. Testing them puts the arresting officer under oath months before any criminal motions hearing.

There is a second route. A driver with no prior conviction within five years may instead apply for an ignition interlock device limited driving permit. It costs $25.00, and the application is due within 30 days of that same notice. It also means handing in the driver’s license and signing an affidavit that gives up the hearing. So it is a choice between the two, not both.

The permit is closed to several groups. Anyone under 21 years of age is shut out. So is a driver who is not currently licensed in Georgia, a commercial license holder, and a driver whose suspension grows out of a crash with injuries or deaths. That first exclusion matters in a university town, and it is why an under-21 Athens DUI has to be sorted out differently from day one. Which path fits a case depends on the driving record, the job and the evidence, and it has to be decided inside a month. Our page on the ignition interlock option works through that election in more detail, and the role the Department of Driver Services plays after an arrest is covered separately.

Where an Athens DUI Case Is Actually Heard

Athens-Clarke County is a consolidated government, and a driver arrested downtown can end up in any of three courthouses. Knowing which one, and when a case can be moved between them, is most of the procedural work of the first two months.

Athens Municipal Court

Roughly 35,000 cases a year move through this court, which takes county ordinance violations along with state misdemeanor traffic charges, DUI among them. Most Athens DUI accusations start here. No juries sit in Athens Municipal Court, so a case left here ends in a plea or a bench trial before the judge. Getting to a jury means filing a written demand in time and having the case transferred, and a demand filed late is a right forfeited rather than denied.

State Court of Clarke County

Transferred Athens DUI files land in the State Court of Clarke County. So do the rest of the county’s misdemeanor and high-and-aggravated misdemeanor cases. This is the courtroom where a driving case is tried to a jury rather than argued to a single judge. It is also where a motion to suppress gets a full record of the evidence. Impaired driving, traffic, family violence and theft make up the bulk of its criminal calendar.

Superior Court of the Western Judicial Circuit

Clarke and Oconee counties together make up the Western Judicial Circuit, and felonies belong to its Superior Court alone. On the driving side that covers vehicular homicide in the first degree, serious injury by vehicle, felony leaving the scene, habitual violator charges, felony fleeing, and the fourth DUI inside a ten-year window. Our companion site carries a parallel Athens page on those felony traffic charges: our serious traffic crimes page for Athens. If the general sequence of hearings is what you are after, our overview of the Georgia DUI court process lays out the stages in order.

DUI Court in Athens GA

Clarke County’s State Court runs a DUI/Drug Court, an accountability court that substitutes close judicial supervision, treatment and monitoring for a jail sentence in eligible repeat cases. The program began in 2001 and was the first of its kind in Georgia, and the National Association of Drug Court Professionals counts it among four National Academy Courts. What it asks of a participant is substantial: a long term of compliance, regular reporting, and costs borne by the participant. Finishing the program does not, on its own, erase the conviction.

DUI Court in Athens GA has one further consequence that is easy to miss. For a driver whose license is suspended after a second DUI conviction within five years, an ignition interlock permit becomes available after at least 120 days of that suspension have been served — but only on a certificate of eligibility from an accountability court, or on proof of enrollment in a qualifying substance abuse treatment program, with surrender of the license. For some clients the accountability court is therefore the shortest route back to lawful driving; for others it is a concession made before anyone has looked at the evidence. That call should follow discovery, not arraignment.

First and Second DUI Penalties in Athens-Clarke County

Georgia does not leave DUI sentencing to local custom. The numbers below are statutory minimums, and an Athens judge applies the same ones as a judge anywhere else in the state.

A first conviction counts as a first only when there is no prior conviction or accepted nolo plea in the previous ten years. Georgia’s driving under the influence statute then sets the sentence. The fine runs from $300.00 to $1,000.00, and it may not be suspended, stayed or probated. The jail term runs from ten days to 12 months, and a judge may suspend or probate all of it. There is one exception. Where the alcohol concentration was 0.08 grams or more, the judge may probate all but 24 hours. The sentence also carries at least 40 hours of community service. It carries a DUI Alcohol or Drug Use Risk Reduction Program, finished within 120 days of conviction. It carries a clinical evaluation, which the court may waive, plus any treatment that evaluation calls for. Where the term is under 12 months, probation fills out the year, less the days actually served.

The license suspension that follows a conviction runs 12 months. At 120 days the driver may ask for early reinstatement. That takes proof of finishing the risk reduction program and a $210.00 restoration fee, or $200.00 when it is processed by mail. Our first offense DUI page goes through the sentence line by line.

An Athens-Clarke County 2nd DUI is a different sentencing exercise. Two lookback periods govern it, and they are not the same length. The criminal penalties turn on a ten-year window, measured from the dates of the earlier arrests to the date of the current one. The fine runs from $600.00 to $1,000.00, and it may not be suspended, stayed or probated. The jail term runs from 90 days to 12 months, and at least 72 hours of it must be served in actual confinement. Add at least 30 days of community service, the risk reduction program within 120 days, and a clinical evaluation with any substance abuse treatment it calls for.

The license side runs on a five-year window instead. A second conviction inside five years suspends the license for three years. The driver cannot even apply for reinstatement until 18 months have run. Getting the license back then takes a year of ignition interlock use, unless that is waived for financial hardship. The sentencing court must also order the license plates of every vehicle registered in the driver’s name to be surrendered to the court. A fourth conviction within ten years is a felony. Our second offense DUI page and our page on license suspension and reinstatement cover the driving side in depth.

With that little room at sentencing, a repeat Athens DUI is decided long before the sentencing hearing. Whether the stop was lawful, how the roadside evaluations were given and scored, what the officer’s own training and certification file shows, when and how the implied consent notice was read, and what the maintenance log for the breath machine records — those are the pressure points, and they are litigated on motions.

The Attorney in the Athens Office

Cory Yager has been defending drivers in Athens-Clarke County and elsewhere in Georgia since 2007. His route into the work ran through a patrol car first: better than nine years in uniform for the Cobb County Police Department and then the City of Roswell Police Department. His State Bar of Georgia ICLE speaker profile records thousands of drunk driving arrests over those years, plus work investigating fatal and serious-injury wrecks. He learned how the State assembles one of these cases years before he learned how to dismantle it.

Law school came while the badge was still on. He finished second in his class at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School while working full time as a Roswell officer. He cleared the Bar examination on his first sitting, took the oath in October of 2007, and started criminal work with William C. Head a week later. Larry Kohn is now his partner. Super Lawyers has listed him as a Rising Star and later as a Super Lawyer, and with Larry Kohn and William C. “Bubba” Head he writes the Georgia DUI Trial Practice Manual, the standard practitioner text on Georgia DUI law. His peer rating from Martindale-Hubbell is AV Preeminent, the highest the service issues.

For more than seventeen years he has also held NHTSA certification to teach police officers the standardized field sobriety battery. Instructing the tests is a different thing from having taken a class in them: it means knowing the script officers are given, the way results are supposed to be recorded, and how far a written report can drift from the paperwork behind it. That is why cross-examination in one of these cases opens with the instructor’s manual, and it is the background clients look for in a criminal lawyer Athens GA courts see week in and week out. His full attorney biography lists the credentials.

Choosing Counsel for an Athens DUI

Hiring an Athens DUI lawyer for a repeat or felony-exposure case is a different exercise from hiring someone to handle a citation. The questions that separate Athens DUI lawyers from one another have plain answers. How many jury trials has the lawyer taken to verdict? Does the lawyer at the consultation show up at calendar call? Does the office handle the Department of Driver Services side as well as the criminal side? Is the plan to argue motions, or to negotiate from the day the file opens?

It is fair to ask a DUI lawyer in Athens GA about local mechanics too: which judge sits on which calendar, how the solicitor-general’s office evaluates a collision case, and when a case has to be moved out of a court that cannot empanel a jury. Among the DUI lawyers Athens residents and students consult, and among the DUI attorneys Athens firms put in front of prospective clients, the useful distinction is between a practice that litigates and one that processes. An Athens Georgia DUI lawyer should say plainly which you are hiring, and a driver facing mandatory jail is entitled to that answer before signing a fee agreement.

Talk to an Athens GA DUI Attorney

Evidence in a DUI case is perishable. Downtown surveillance video is overwritten on a fixed cycle, in-car and body-worn recordings are retained on a schedule, and memories of a roadside encounter fade. The 30-day administrative deadline runs from the day of the arrest, so counsel should be retained before the first court date rather than at it.

Kohn & Yager, LLC
320 East Clayton Street, Suite 435
Athens, GA 30601
About 200 yards from the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse
(404) 567-5515

Consultations are confidential and without charge. Ask for Cory Yager, the ex-cop turned defense attorney. Our other Athens attorney pages, our Clarke County drunk driving arrest guide and the history of this firm’s work in Athens cover related ground.

Attorney advertising. The foregoing is general information regarding Georgia law and is not legal advice, nor does it create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.