What Is The Current Status Of Diversion For DUI In San Francisco County?

In 2021, under Penal Code Section 1001.95 in California, diversion suddenly became a possibility for DUI charges. Unfortunately, while the law passed the legislature in 2021, the ability to use it for DUIs ran into fierce legal opposition. Despite courts in San Francisco County and the Bay Area allowing DUI diversion, the programs received fierce opposition from others. These restrictive voices won out, not in the legislature, but in the courts.

As a result, for the time being, diversion is not available for DUI charges anywhere in California. Let us take a moment to look at what it meant, and why it might be such a boon for San Francisco County drivers if diversion returns.

What Is Diversion?

Diversion is an alternative to a traditional guilty sentence and conviction. It is most often granted to first-time offenders for minor crimes or certain misdemeanors, and allows them to erase the charge and conviction from their record if they complete the diversion program.

If a judge grants a diversion, the defendant will have a certain amount of time to meet specific requirements such as community service, counseling, classes, and more. If you complete the terms of the diversion, your case will be diverted out of the criminal court system, avoiding any convictions on your criminal record.

When diversion began to be explored in California for misdemeanors in 2021, San Francisco County became a leader even in the Bay Area in terms of considering DUIs for diversion. There were also positive steps seen in Alameda, Sonoma, and Marin Counties, where judges briefly started to grant diversion motions on first offense DUIs, though on a more limited basis than we saw in San Francisco.

I had a number of these diversion motions granted within just a few months in San Francisco, and I have some extremely happy clients because of it.

What Makes Diversion Such An Appealing Alternative When Facing DUI Charges?

If you were offered a diversion, a judge would give you the terms and ask if you accept them. Typically, it would have been a period between six months and two years, in which you and your attorney would have to return to court to report on your progress during this time.

Depending upon the level of alcohol in your system, the judge usually chose to require DUI school, as well as AA meetings, community service requirements, or other things of that nature. This offered several advantages:

1. Since there was no fine connected with diversion programs, you might have saved roughly $2,000 just by participating in a diversion program.
2. Since there would be no criminal conviction on your record, you would not have run into problems applying for jobs, loans, or professional licenses.
3. With no probation period after the diversion program, you wouldn’t be looking at a six-month jail sentence if you were to slip up.

From the government’s perspective, there were also many positive reasons to encourage diversion programs as well, which explained the overwhelming support for this new system in the legislature (unfortunately, that did not manifest into enough support for it on DUI charges to overrule the courts).

After all, the government didn’t want people on a first-time arrest to have the stigma of a criminal conviction; they wanted to give people a chance to address their problems, pay their dues to society, and be able to move on.

Why Didn’t The San Francisco DUI Diversion Experiment Continue?

While Diversion motions were granted in San Francisco, Alameda, Sonoma, and Marin Counties, most of the other Bay Area counties followed the rest of the state and were very resistant to this change. They granted very few diversions, and their District Attorneys challenged the ones that were given.

These challenges, as well as those from other counties, relied on an older law, which said that DUIs could not be diverted. They argued that this older law overruled the new one, which allowed diversions for all sorts of charges, and did not specify that DUIs were included. Unfortunately, the higher courts ended up agreeing with these judges and prosecutors.

They ruled that until a specific law was passed to allow Diversion for DUI charges, or until the old law restricting diversions on DUIs was repealed, there could be no diversions applied for DUIs, even under the new law. Since it is unclear if that will ever happen, diversion is no longer an available strategy when facing a DUI charge.

This means that it is more important than ever to reach out to an experienced DUI defense attorney when you are facing drunk driving charges. If you have been arrested in San Francisco County or anywhere else in the Bay Area, a free initial consultation with my team should be your next step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (415) 286-9364 today.