Texas is Time of Driving State – Houston DWI Lawyer

Texas is a time of driving state, this means it only matters how much alcohol was in your system at the time you were driving, not at the time that you took a breath or blood test.

Hi, my name is Eric Benavides. I’m a Houston criminal defense lawyer. I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about DWI and specifically the fact that in Texas we are what they call a “time of driving” state.

Now, what time of driving means, is that it only matters how much alcohol you had in your system at the time you were driving at the time you were pulled over. Now, happy to announce that yesterday, I secured a not guilty verdict in front of a Houston criminal jury where this was the exact issue. My client had a breath test that was almost 0.10. It was 0.098.

But it was one hour after the stop. Now we were able to demonstrate to the jury that just because somebody’s level of intoxication is 0.09, that’s let’s say 2:00 am, that doesn’t mean that they were 0.09 when they were pulled over and 1:00 am.

I was able to use the state’s own experts against them. By the end of the cross-examination, the state’s experts told the jury “yes it is very possible that the time of driving this individual was under the legal limit” and that’s all the jury needed to hear.

That’s enough reasonable doubt to find somebody not guilty of driving while intoxicated. But think about it. Is that fair? Absolutely it’s fair. Why should they take some sort of specimen from you hours later and count that as the amount of alcohol that was in your body earlier?

It doesn’t make sense and that’s the reason that there’s defense attorneys like me. Defense attorneys that are willing to fight for you and defense attorneys that are willing to show the jury that just because something’s on paper doesn’t mean it’s true.

That’s a bit of background about the law in Texas regarding time of driving. If you have any specific questions about that please reach out to me give me a call and we’ll talk about it.

Thank you!