Arlington DWI Lawyer

Your Arlington Case Is Not Heard in Arlington

This is the first thing most people get wrong, and it is worth clearing up before anything else.

You were stopped in Arlington. You were probably taken to an Arlington facility. But the case itself belongs to Tarrant County, and Tarrant County hears its criminal cases in downtown Fort Worth, at the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center. Arlington, Grapevine, Euless, Bedford, and North Richland Hills arrests all land in the same building. The city where the stop happened decides almost nothing about where the case goes.

That has a practical consequence. When you search for a lawyer, you are not really looking for someone in Arlington. You are looking for someone who is in the Tim Curry building often enough to know how a given court runs its docket.

Read the full county walkthrough on Fort Worth DWI Lawyer, and the building itself on the Tarrant County courthouse guide.

If Someone Told You It Was a Checkpoint

Texas does not run sobriety checkpoints, and that matters more in Arlington than in most places.

There is no roadblock in Texas where every car gets funneled through and an officer leans in to ask whether you have been drinking. Texas courts have held that kind of stop unconstitutional as conducted, because the legislature never enacted a scheme authorizing it and setting the procedures such a stop would require. What Texas agencies run instead is saturation patrol: more officers on the road around high-risk dates, each still needing a specific reason to stop you individually.

So if you were told you went through a checkpoint, something else happened, and what that something else was is the first question a defense asks. The reason for the stop is a separate fight from the reason for the arrest, and it comes first.

The full explanation, including the case law and what saturation patrol actually looks like, is on DWI Checkpoints.

What Tarrant County Does With a Refusal

Tarrant County runs no-refusal periods, which means a refusal here often does not end with a refusal.

When a prosecutor and a magistrate are on call, a breath test refusal turns into a warrant application and a blood draw the same night. So a large share of Tarrant County cases end up resting on a number after all. Tarrant analyzes that blood at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Forensic Laboratory rather than the state DPS lab, which changes what records exist and how the analysis gets challenged.

A number is where a defense starts, not where a case ends. The warrant affidavit, the draw, the chain of custody, the analyst’s method, and the instrument’s own maintenance history are all separate points of attack.

See No Refusal Weekends, Blood Search Warrants, and Can a DWI Blood Test Be Wrong?.

Is There a Deandra Grant Law Office in Arlington?

No. Being straight about that is more useful than being vague.

Deandra Grant Law has six offices: Dallas, Fort Worth, Allen, Denton, Rockwall, and Waco. There is no Arlington office. Arlington is a service area, which means the firm represents people arrested there and appears in the courts that hear their cases. The Fort Worth office is the one that sits closest to where an Arlington case is actually heard, which is the proximity that matters for a Tarrant County DWI.

Your License Case Is on a Separate Clock

The criminal case and the license case are two different proceedings, and the license one moves first.

The license case is administrative, it belongs to the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the deadline is 15 days from the notice of suspension to request an Administrative License Revocation hearing. Requesting that hearing on time is what stays the suspension while the hearing is pending. Missing the deadline is what makes the suspension automatic, and nothing in the criminal case fixes it afterward.

That clock runs the same in Arlington as it does anywhere in Texas. It does not pause because you have not been to court yet.

Start with The 15-Day Rule, then The ALR Hearing and How Long Your License Is Suspended.

Where to Read the Rest

By charge: DWI First Offense, Second and Third DWI, Felony DWI. By evidence: Field Sobriety Tests and Can a DWI Blood Test Be Wrong?. Everything else starts at the DWI library.