Two a.m. on I-16
It was two in the morning on I-16, headed west out of Savannah. A Georgia State Patrol sergeant turned on his blue lights and pulled over a silver pickup.
The sergeant did not run the DUI investigation. He called another trooper to come do it. That trooper wrote the report.
What the Report Says
The report says the sergeant saw the truck "maintain its lane multiple times."
Read it again. Maintain its lane. Not fail to. That is what the trooper wrote down, and a supervisor signed off on it four days later. This was the reason for the stop, and the report says the driver did what the law asks.
Maybe the trooper meant something else. But he did not write something else. And the sergeant who saw the driving did not write anything at all.
The Beers
My client told the trooper he had been at a Ghost Pirates game. He said he had two or three Miller Lites. It was two in the morning, and he was going home.
The trooper saw red, watery eyes. He smelled alcohol. He asked if he could check my client's eyes "to make sure he was safe to drive."
That is a kind way to ask. It does not sound like the start of a DUI test. It was one.
The Tests
There were three.
The eye test, horizontal gaze nystagmus. The trooper marked six clues out of six.
The walk and turn. He marked five clues out of eight. My client took nine steps out and nine steps back. That was the right number.
The one leg stand. He wrote two clues out of four, but the boxes for which clues are blank. He did not mark whether my client swayed, raised his arms, hopped, or put his foot down. He wrote the number and nothing behind it.
The report does not say where the tests were given. It says it was dark. It was the shoulder of an interstate at two in the morning, with trucks going by. The tests were not built for that.
The checklist says my client's speech was slurred and mumbled. The narrative never mentions it. The checklist also says he was polite, sleepy, and withdrawn. His appearance was marked "nothing unusual." A man going home at two in the morning is sleepy. That is not a crime.
The Refusals
My client refused the portable breath test on the roadside. Then he was arrested. The trooper read him the implied consent notice at 2:26, twelve minutes after the stop. My client agreed to a blood test, and then he refused when EMS came to draw it.
So there was no number. There was no breath result and no blood result. There was only the trooper's opinion.
The Result
A refusal in Georgia puts the license at risk for a year. We kept his license from being suspended.
The State charged DUI less safe. It could not prove he was a less safe driver. It had a stop for keeping in his lane, three roadside tests given in the dark, and no chemical test.
The DUI was reduced to reckless driving.
Reckless driving is not a DUI. It does not count as a prior if there is ever a next time. It does not carry a DUI suspension. It is a traffic offense, and he paid for it and went on.
That is a win.
Here is a link to the final judgment: https://savannahduilawyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-07-07-DUI-reduced-to-Reckless-driving-in-Savannah.pdf
Every case is different. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
