Michigan Operating With the Presence of Drugs (OWPD) is a strict liability offense. This means that if you have any amount of a controlled substance in your system while driving a motor vehicle you are guilty of driving on drugs.

There are still defenses to driving on drugs and in this case the defense was that scientifically the amount of drugs in there person’s system was just to small to be reliable evidence. 

Charged with driving on drugs in Michigan? Call criminal defense lawyer, Aaron J. Boria today (734) 453-7806. We fight for clients and we get results other lawyers simply do not. 

Michigan Operating With the Presence of Drugs

When someone is arrested for suspicion of driving on drugs they will be required to submit to a chemical test under Michigan’s Implied Consent Law. Their blood will be taken and it will be put into a vile that will then be sent of to the Michigan State Police crime lab in Lansing where it will be analyzed.

Machines are then used to detect the presence of a controlled substance in the person’s blood. The government claims that these machines can detect substances like marijuana in trace amounts; amounts so incredibly small they are measured in nanograms. To put it into perspective, a nonogram is a billionth of a gram; it is written as 0.000000001g.

The prosecutors will try to convict someone with as little as a single nanogram of active THC in their system. This means that a person could smoke marijuana, hours could go by and they could feel completely sober, and in many cases they are.

A major problem that many Michigan criminal lawyers do not know is that the machine used to detect the marijuana has an error rate of as much as 3 nanograms. So a person that registers any where from 1-3 may actually be 0 and dead sober.

Michigan Driving on Drugs Lawyer

Not only is Aaron J. Boria a Michigan criminal lawyer, but he is also a committed Michigan driving on drugs lawyer.

Our most recent success involved a student athlete who was pulled over after the officer accused the client of not coming to a complete stop. The officer ordered the client out of the vehicle and asked the client to do field sobriety tests. The client did well on the field sobriety tests but the officer arrested them for driving on drugs anyway and his blood was drawn. The matter was set for trial a few months out and just a week before the trial date the lab results came back indicating 1 nanogram of active marijuana.

As discussed above the machine has at least a 3 nanogram error rate. Again a completely sober person could register as having active THC in their system when in fact they did not.

Michigan Driving on Drugs Dismissed

After Michigan criminal lawyer, Aaron J. Boria has further negotiations with the prosecutor they agreed to dismiss the driving on drugs charge against our client. Our client will not have to go to trial, and he will never have this offense on his record.

Aside from the normal operating while intoxicated offense blood cases could have additional defenses:

Was the blood drawn properly?

Was the blood stored properly?

Was the blood handled properly by police and technicians?

Was there enough of the drug found to believe the results were reliable?  

If you have been charged with driving on drugs contact Michigan criminal lawyer Aaron J. Boria today for a free consultation. (734) 453-7806.