Does A Three-Day License Suspension Count As A Prior Conviction?
You’ve been charged with impaired driving, whether it’s impaired driving by alcohol or impaired driving by drug. You come to our law firm and you indicate to us look I once got a 3 day suspension. What happened 4 years ago for example, is I was driving and I went into a RIDE program and I blew an alert meaning you blew between 50 and 100 milligrams on the roadside screening test. In that situation the police did not charge you with a criminal offence but what they did was they did a roadside administrative 3 day licence suspension. A lot of our clients will say “will this hurt me in defending my DUI? Does that count as a criminal record? How does that affect me?”The short answer to the question is it doesn’t affect this current charge at all. It was simply an administrative licence suspension. The Judge is never going to hear about that if you proceed to trial and it’s not a factor at all. So you don’t have to worry about that. Certainly not advisable to continue to get those types of suspensions because it may or may not affect your insurance rates on your car but it certainly does not affect your defence of your current criminal charge.
