I’m a criminal defense lawyer here in Las Vegas and have been practicing for over 18 years now. Today, I want to talk to you about the issue of DMV Appeals. Let’s say that you’ve had your DMV hearing and you, like say nine out of ten people lose the DMV hearing, in other words, the administrative law Judge for the DMV revokes your driving privileges. Your license gets revoked for a period of 90 days and the only thing you can do is file an appeal, but it’s very important that your attorney file what’s called a request for a stay. That means you have to file a stay with the district court what is a stay? Stay means you’re asking the Judge, please don’t revoke my license here’s my case, and here’s why I think I’m going to win. That’s the reason why you have to have the stay is that if you don’t and you have your appeal, by the time the court hears the appeal you already will have suffered that 90-day revocation of your license.
Once the stay is granted, what happens is you have your appeal now what happens with the appeal is you have to prepare your appeal, get the transcript, then also what’s going to happen is the court will give the attorney general’s office who represents the DMV a chance to do an opposition. They do an opposition and you can do a reply and then after that, the judge will hear the merits of the appeal and determine if the administrative law judge committed an error that’s reversible. If he does reverse the DMV decision then you’re going to be allowed to drive, if he
Affirms, then the revocation of your license will stand and the time will start for your license to be revoked.
We recently won a DMV appeal, in this case, what happened was the officer didn’t tell our client pursuant to NRS that his or her license will be revoked if he or she did not take the blood or breath test. They have to tell you that pursuant to that statute so because of that issue, the district court agreed that there wasn’t substantial compliance and reversed the lower court decision revoking are our client's license. Our client is allowed to drive.