FREE CASE EVALUATION

Answer: There’s often two; it’s a two-pronged approach to a DUI in Maryland. There’s always the MVA issue, and then you have the actual DUI criminal charge itself. With the change in law, with Noah’s law being enacted, we’re doing far less MVA hearings, because there’s just no real value to them anymore. So, it was traditionally two court appearances—the MVA hearing and then a court hearing. So now, it’s more on the court side.

If the case is resolved in district court, and if the witnesses are there it would just be one court appearance criminally. But often you either pull a bad judge, or there’s a witness missing, the state asks for a postponement, so sometimes there could be an additional court date here or there. The only other instance would be if you get to district court and you really want to take it up to circuit court to either get it in front of a different judge or to have an actual jury trial, there could be another court date there. So the average is sometime between one and three court appearances for the actual DUI itself.