Passengers as Witnesses in a DUI Case
After an arrest for DUI, your criminal defense attorney will interview any witnesses in your case (unless there you and your attorney decide there is a good reason not to contact the potential witness). For this reason, you should provide your attorney with a list of any witnesses along with their contact information.
If there were other occupants in your vehicle at the time of the stop, those passengers often make very good witnesses at trial. The can testify to the amount of alcohol or drugs consumed, the fact that the driver did not appear to be impaired, and all of their observations that show clues indicating a lack of impairment.
The DUI investigating officer knows this as well. Prosecutors also want to know who those witnesses are and what they have to say beforehand to most effectively deal with those issues.
For this reason, that officer might interview all of the passengers at the time of the stop. This is particular common when a group of people have been out bar hopping or otherwise socializing together. In those cases, the officer investigating the DUI will talk to each passenger and include their contact information in the offense report.
The report might document what each passenger said, especially about the person accused of DUI. Witnesses of this sort can be important sources of information.
The officer might question the passenger to fill in the gaps about where the defendant has been in the hours before arrest and how much the defendant has had to drink. These passenger witnesses might provide information that will contradict the defendant’s story. The officer is trained to interview them away from the defendant because what they have to say may be valuable evidence later on.
The officer knows that the passenger witness might tend to provide exculpatory evidence such as: “He wasn’t drinking” or “He was fine to drive while is why I got into the vehicle as a passenger.” Nevertheless, the officer might want to have those statements locked down at the beginning of the case prevents the witness from later embellishing or fabricating a more damaging story at trial.
That information might also provide a good basis for the prosecutor to attempt to impeach the witness at trial.
If the witnesses were not identified and listed in the offense report, a good DUI defense lawyer will use that failure to document as evidence of a careless or incomplete investigation. Then a good DUI defense attorney will locate and interview passengers to see if they can be helpful witnesses.
Attorneys for DUI Investigations in Florida
If your DUI case involves a passenger that might be a witness, contact an experienced DUI defense attorney at Sammis Law Firm. We can explain how we deal with those issues involving passenger witnesses during the administrative hearing, pretrial motion hearings, and trial.
We can explain what evidence you should gather at the earliest stages of the case, including the contact information for any witnesses that saw you or spoke to you in the hours before the arrest.
Let us put our experience to work for you. We fight DUI cases throughout the greater Tampa Bay area. Call 813-250-0500.
This article was last updated on Friday, January 16, 2025.
