 Hi, I'm David Cantor with the Law Offices of David Michael Cantor. Now I'm going to be talking about vehicular aggravated assault. Now what is that? Well the definition is if a person intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly causes serious physical injury or disfigurement, or if they use a dangerous instrument such as a car and they cause somebody to be in imminent fear or cause serious physical injury, then that means they're guilty of vehicular aggravated assault. Now this is overcharged all the time by the county attorney's office. What they will do is say, well an officer was scared when there was a car coming at him and he had to jump out of the way, let's charge somebody with vehicular aggravated assault. The problem is the amount of punishment that's involved. If you're convicted and the car is determined to be a dangerous instrument, you're facing 5 to 15 years in prison with 7.5 years presumptive. That's very serious. The policy offers by the county attorney's office are quite simple. If you're over a .20 and you have a prior DUI, they're going to ask for prison and they won't budge. If it's a first defense DUI and you're under a .20 and you got in an accident and somebody broke a leg or needed stitches, then they're going to ask for probation with a year in jail. Either way it's a bad scenario. Now in order to show that there was a serious physical injury, the county attorney's office will use medical records. And you need to look, is it just stitches or is it really a broken bone or permanent disfigurement? And that's one of the defenses you look at. Also causation or supervening cause. We bring in an accident reconstructionist and this is a key person who will determine who is really at fault. Was there a phantom vehicle? That means a vehicle that maybe snapped into a person's lane and caused them to go out. There's an accident and they keep going. Was the person who got hit actually the cause? Did they run into you and bring about their own injuries? That's something you need to look at. Now with blood and breath testing, there's a litany of ways to challenge that. You look at the standard quality assurance procedures to see whether the device is more than plus or minus 10% out of whack. You look at body temperature that can affect the reading on a breath test. You look for mouth alcohol if somebody went and brought up some mouth alcohol. If there's blood involved, you look at the swab. Was it a betadine swab or was it an alcohol swab? Did the officer use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer before he palpitated the vein? Which means he's actually transferring alcohol right to the injection site. Other things you look at have to do with the testing device itself. There are all sorts of defenses to these charges. We've been very successful. If you go over to our victory section, you can see under vehicular aggravated assault all of the victories we've had. This is one of the most overcharged charges out there and it is very defensible. So if this involves you, a friend or a family member, give us a call or go to our website at dmcanner.com.