Ask Deandra – What is an ALR Hearing & Do I Need One?

Hello everyone. I’m Deandra Grant, and welcome to my Ask Deandra video series, where I answer the most commonly asked questions about Texas DWIs on Google. Today we’re going to be talking about ALR hearings, with the question being: what is an ALR hearing, and do I need to have one?

First off, ALR stands for administrative license revocation, and that coincides with an arrest for DWI in Texas. Other states have similar programs. They’re called different things, but the general consensus is that if you are arrested for a DWI, then there is a driver’s license implication that goes along with that.

In Texas, what happens is if you are arrested for DWI, you are going to be served notice of suspension, most of the time at the time you are arrested, and that is going to trigger a 15-day window for you to request an ALR hearing. But let me back up a little bit and give you the specifics, because the 15-day window is going to depend on what the facts of your case were.

First off, let’s say you get stopped for DWI, you get arrested, and the police officer reads you what we call the statutory warnings and says to you, “Hey, would you provide a breath test?” And you say, “Yes, I will.” Then you’re going to be taken down to the police station, to where a breath testing device is located, which is called the Intoxilyzer 9000, and you’re going to be asked to blow into it. There are actually two times that you blow into it, but at the end of that test sequence, you are given a result. It prints out on a piece of paper, and the officer will know at that moment whether you blew a 0.08 or higher.

If you blew under a 0.08, there are no ALR implications for you. Your driver’s license is not going to be suspended. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to still file a DWI case against you, but your driver’s license is not going to be suspended. If you blow a 0.08 or higher, then at that time the officer is going to serve you with notice of suspension for blowing over the legal limit. And at that moment, it starts the clock. You have 15 days to request an administrative license revocation, or ALR, hearing. If you do request it within the 15 days, then nothing happens to your driver’s license until a hearing is held, and that could be several months down the road. If you fail to request your hearing during the 15 days, then on the 40th day after you were served that notice, your driver’s license suspension is going to start. The length of that suspension depends on whether you’re a first-time DWI arrest or if you have prior DWIs.

Okay, so that’s what happens if you consented to a breath test and blew a result over a 0.08: it triggers the 15 days. Now, what happens if you refuse to take the breath test? You say, “I’m not taking it. I refuse.” Then that is considered a refusal, and the same thing would happen that happened when you blew over a 0.08. The officer is going to serve you with a notice of suspension. Starting that day, you have 15 days to request your hearing, and if you don’t request it, then on the 40th day, a longer suspension is going to kick in, because you refused to provide a specimen to the police officer.

Now let’s talk about blood. The police officer says, “We don’t want breath. We want blood from you,” and you say okay, and you provide a blood specimen. Well, then there is no notice of suspension served to you, because they’re not going to take any action until they see what the blood test result is. At some point down the road, and that’s an unknown amount of time, there’s going to be a blood analysis. It’s going to come back on a lab report, and DPS is going to be notified of the result. When they get the result, DPS looks at it, and if the blood came back, say, a 0.07, then there’s no driver’s license implication. There’s no ALR. It’s just like if you had taken the breath test and blown under a 0.08. Your driver’s license is fine at that point. But if the blood test result is over a 0.08, let’s say it’s a 0.12, then they’re going to mail notice of suspension to you at the address that they have on record for you.

Which is why it’s so incredibly important, and we tell our new DWI clients this: you have to make sure that your address with DPS is up to date. If you’ve moved, you moved out of your parents’ house, you moved to a new apartment, you changed apartments, whatever the situation is, DPS must have your current address, because when they mail that notice, that’s where it goes, and it typically will not be forwarded. It’ll just go back to DPS if you don’t receive it, or someone who lives where you used to live will get it and throw it in the trash. So it’s really important that your address be updated, so that if you get a letter from DPS, you’re able to act on it.

Remember when we said 15 days was the window? Well, when they’re mailing you notice, it’s actually 20, because they presume that on the fifth day after the notice has been mailed to you, you’ve received it. And so then they give you 15 days from that 5 days, so it’s a total of 20 to request your hearing. We’ve had clients before who we’ve told, hey, watch for the letter. We don’t know when the letter’s coming; you’ve got to be watching for it. And then they don’t check their mail often, or they live with their parents and their parents are supposed to be checking the mail and they never check it, and they miss their opportunity to request an ALR hearing. Your attorney can’t request it for you until you get the notice of suspension. So it’s really important, if you’ve been arrested for DWI and you consented to blood, that you’re checking your mail, to make sure that if you receive that notice, we can go ahead and get your driver’s license hearing requested.

Now, let’s say you didn’t consent to blood. It’s the same as if you didn’t consent to breath. They serve you with notice of suspension right then at the time of your arrest, and your 15 days starts at that point. So those are the different scenarios that can happen in a DWI case and how the ALR time clock gets triggered.

Now, why do you want to have an ALR hearing? Well, an ALR hearing can be very, very helpful. We typically will subpoena the arresting officer to come to the hearing. At that point, he hasn’t been, I guess the best word to use would be prepped, by the DA’s office. He hasn’t spoken to anyone about your case. He hasn’t talked to a prosecutor, and he’s not going to talk to a prosecutor at the hearing. What he’s going to do is get up and say whatever he remembers or doesn’t remember. Sometimes it can be very helpful, because we can then get a transcript of that hearing and possibly use it in your criminal case.

You have to think about the ALR hearing and the criminal case, the DWI, as like two trains on two separate tracks. They do not leave the station at the same time, they’re not traveling at the same speed, and they don’t ever cross each other. The ALR is the civil action against your driver’s license. The DWI is a criminal case filed on you by the state of Texas. They don’t have anything to do with each other.

But there is an exception to that. Let’s say that we win the ALR hearing because the police officer can’t prove up what we call reasonable suspicion to contact you, or probable cause to arrest you for DWI. Then we can sometimes go to the prosecutor on your criminal case and say, “Hey, look, you’re going to have some problems here, because we’ve already got this police officer in sworn testimony, and he says all kinds of crazy stuff, and the judge in the ALR hearing threw this case out.” Does that mean that the prosecutor has to do the same thing? No. But prosecutors don’t often want to try cases that they think they’re going to lose. So they might offer to reduce your case. They may dismiss your case. There may be some sort of negotiation that goes on that would not have happened had we not had that ALR transcript.

And sometimes, if we think that the stop was bad or the arrest had no probable cause, then we might file what’s called a motion to suppress. What I’ve done typically is attach the judge’s opinion from the ALR hearing as an exhibit on my motion to suppress, so that the judge in the criminal case looks at it and goes, “Oh, wait a minute. A judge has already heard this and found that it needed to be thrown out.”

So those are just some ways that ALR hearings can help. Another thing: let’s say we don’t win the ALR hearing, but we’ve got this transcript. Now fast forward six months, eight months, a year. We’re going to trial on your criminal case, and that same police officer gets on the witness stand and says things that are different than what he said under sworn testimony at your ALR hearing. Then we can do what’s called impeachment. “Hey, wait a minute. When you testified about this back closer to the time of the arrest, when your memory was better, you said this. You said you didn’t smell alcohol when you first walked up to the car. Now here we are in this trial, and you’re saying you smelled alcohol immediately. Which is it? Are you telling the truth now? Were you lying then?” That sort of thing. So that’s another way that ALR hearings are really a blessing to criminal defense attorneys who handle DWI cases.

If you’re out shopping for lawyers in Texas on DWIs and you meet with one who tells you they don’t do ALR hearings, or ALR hearings are worthless, I would suggest you run, because that person is not someone that actually knows what the hell they’re doing. So you want to have your ALR hearing. You don’t want to miss your window. And your attorney will request the hearing for you, normally. That’s what we do, and I would assume others are doing that as well.

Hopefully you found this interesting and helpful. If you’re charged with a DWI in Texas and you’re going through this process, it can be very confusing. There are all sorts of dates and timelines and different suspension periods for different scenarios. I write a blog series called Ask Deandra, where I actually write all this stuff down in a blog, and then I turn around and film a video about it. So if you want more information, you can go to my website and read the actual full blog on this topic. I will put the link in the description. Thanks, and good luck with your DWI charge.