It serves 2 primary purposes. (1) if you’re in a state that requires it, you pay a fee in order to receive your hearing – revenue generation. (2) it gives your lawyer the opportunity to cross examine the officer prior to trial. Anything they say at this hearing is admissable during your trial. – if they say ‘I didn’t smell alcohol when I approached the vehicle,’ (@ hearing) but change to “as I approached the vehicle I detected a strong odor of alcohol” during your trial, you can use this against them. Regardless, you can drive for up to 30 days until your hearing and then your license is suspended until your trial or plea bargain. An “interesting” sidenote is that if, at the hearing, you agree to plead guilty, the officer will not file an administrative suspension. Meaning, you will get your license back at this point in exchange for pleading guilty.

Again, I’m not supporting Cabrera in anyway, but our dui laws are a crock. They are written in such a way as to provide gov’t with a revenue generating machine. There have been instances where the officer’s reports are pre-written. Meaning, 99% of them have this wording – “I noticed bloodshot, watery eyes, slurred speech, and a distinct odor of alcohol.”

Safest way to avoid an incident, is to not drink and drive.

Ozzie moved out to Californy a couple of years ago, just ahead of the bill collectors. But even without him, that highway feels like the inside of a particle accelerator in the wee hours and you’re the celluloid impact plate. One wrong move and you’re ropa vieja with your eyeballs for the olives.

By the way, I know the GCP and the Whitestone, too….

If the driver doesn’t request the “show cause” hearing within seven days, then his suspension automatically goes into effect.

A state can suspend the privilege to drive in that state of anyone who refuses, whether the driver has a license from that state or not. But because the physical license belongs to the state (whichever one issued it) and not the driver, in Idaho we don’t seize the license, we give the driver notice that their privileges will be suspended for a year, with the start date depending on whether they request a “show cause” hearing or not, as described above.

A person who drives in Idaho when their privileges have been suspended by ANY state is guilty of driving without privileges. I think most states’ driving without privileges laws are similar — a state could theoretically say “you can drive in this state, even if all the other states have suspended your privileges, so long as we haven’t” but that would be unlikely (since the point of DWP laws is that the fact of the suspension indicates this is probably an unsafe driver (usually, not always), and allowing drivers flagged as unsafe to drive in your state is not usually a politically expedient stance).

So…my guess is that because Cabrera requested a hearing, his privileges have not been suspended yet. If he loses today then, regardless of what state issued his license, he will lose the privilege to drive for a year. If he shows that the officer did not have legal cause to ask him to take the test, then he is back on the road. As Craig pointed out, that seems like a pretty remote possibility.