By Attorney Charles E. Liken Jr., former Colorado Deputy District Attorney. A DUI arrest starts two cases on the same night — one at the DMV, one in court. Here is how each gets taken apart, piece by piece, and what you can do in the first week that actually matters.
Charles E. Liken Jr., Esq. — On the Legal Front Lines · Government Investigator, Denver Human Services · Licensed Colorado Attorney ~ 20+ Years in Private Practice · Colorado Deputy District Attorney · Colorado Court-Appointed Child and Family Investigator
A DUI file is a chain: the stop, the roadside, the test, the paperwork, the story the prosecutor tells from it. Every link was made by a person following a procedure, and every procedure has a manual it can be measured against. What follows is general information about how that examination works — not a prediction about any particular case.
Before anything else, the officer needs a lawful reason to pull the car over — a traffic violation, an equipment defect, or specific facts suggesting a crime. We read the report and, where it exists, the dash and body camera against that standard. If the stop was not supported, everything that followed it may be subject to challenge.
Where LLF comes in: The report is the officer's version. The video is what happened. We start by finding the gap between the two.
Standardized field sobriety tests are scored procedures, validated only when administered the way the training manual requires. Lighting, footwear, road surface, weather, age, weight, injury and medical conditions all affect performance, and the manual says so. We compare what was written against what the video shows and against how the tests are supposed to be run.
Where LLF comes in: A roadside “failure” is an officer's scoring of a procedure. Whether the procedure was followed is a question we can ask.
A breath or blood number is an instrument output with a records trail behind it: calibration and maintenance logs, operator certification, blood-draw procedure, preservative and storage conditions, chain of custody, and the lab's own analysis notes. All of it can be requested. And what a test measures is the level at the moment of testing, which is not automatically the level at the moment of driving.
Where LLF comes in: We pull the records behind the number. Sometimes the number holds. Sometimes the paperwork does not.
The license side moves fast and independently of court. There is a short window — commonly seven days — to request an express consent hearing before the Division of Motor Vehicles, and missing it can forfeit the chance to contest the revocation no matter how the criminal case ends. At that hearing the arresting officer can be subpoenaed and questioned under oath — which is also the first look at how the officer testifies. The seven-day rule, explained →
Where LLF comes in: Request the hearing first, argue about everything else second. That order is not negotiable.
Most criminal cases resolve without a trial, and what a case resolves to depends on the strength of the evidence, the driving history, the aggravators, and the practices of the particular court. When a case does not resolve, the burden stays with the prosecution to prove every element beyond a reasonable doubt — including who was driving, when, and that the person was substantially incapable of safe operation, not merely that a number appeared on a printout.
Where LLF comes in: Two years as a Deputy District Attorney means we know how the other side scores a file — where they see a clean case, and where they see a problem they hope you won't notice.
Ready when you are — talk it through with Attorney Liken.
Your choice: no-charge 20-minute phone call OR in-depth hour ($300) — both directly with Attorney Liken.
Yes. The DMV handles your license through an express consent revocation, and the court handles the criminal charge. They run on separate clocks with separate rules, and the DMV side can be lost by missing a deadline regardless of what happens in court.
Commonly seven days from the notice of revocation. Missing that window can forfeit the chance to contest the license revocation. Confirm the date on your paperwork immediately.
The result is an instrument or laboratory output with a records trail behind it: calibration and maintenance logs, operator certification, draw procedure, storage conditions, and chain of custody. Those records can be requested and examined, and timing between driving and testing matters.
Most criminal cases resolve without a trial. Whether yours does depends on the evidence, your history, and the practices of the particular court and prosecutor. We prepare for both paths from the start.
The honest picture: the quality of the evidence sets the ceiling on what any lawyer can do, and that quality is fixed on the night of the arrest. What is not fixed is whether anyone examines it. A stop with no articulable basis, roadsides run off-manual, a breath instrument with a gap in its maintenance log, a blood kit stored warm — each of those is invisible in the police report and only surfaces when someone goes looking. That examination is the job. Outcomes depend on the facts of the individual case.
The expensive mistakes are predictable: missing the DMV window, pleading at the first court date “to get it over with,” and treating the police report as gospel. The report is one side's story — Attorney Liken spent a career writing and reading those reports for the government; he knows exactly how much daylight hides between a report and the truth.
Write down everything you remember about the evening now — what you ate and drank and when, who you were with, the route, what was said at the roadside. Keep every piece of paper from the scene and the jail, especially the notice about your license. Preserve receipts, texts and phone location history before they age out. And say nothing about the case on social media; screenshots travel.
Before you talk to anyone — DA, DMV, insurance — get twenty minutes with the prosecutor turned defender.