Arrested for DUI in Horry County
A DUI arrest is not a DUI conviction.
Before you plead guilty to anything, read this. It will take you six minutes,
and it may be the most useful six minutes you spend this week.
Johnny Gardner
If you are reading this the morning after, I have a rough idea how you feel. You have been up all night. Somebody has your license. You are holding a piece of paper with a court date on it and about half of it may as well be written in another language. And somewhere behind all of that, you have quietly already decided you are guilty, because you know what you had to drink.
I want to tell you something, as a lawyer who has spent more than thirty years on both sides of a South Carolina DUI case.
An arrest is an accusation. It is not a verdict.
In this state, an accusation has to be proved. On video. Under rules the arresting officer is required by law to follow. In front of a judge who has watched a thousand of these tapes and knows exactly what a clean stop looks like.
I am not going to promise you an outcome. No honest lawyer can, and the ones who do are telling you what you want to hear because you are frightened and frightened people sign things. What I will tell you is this: a great many people plead guilty to DUI in this county without anyone ever sitting down and watching the video. Do not be one of them.
First, the part almost nobody tells you about.
There are two clocks running right now, and they are not the same clock.
The first is your court date. It is printed on your paperwork and it is probably weeks away. The second one is your driver’s license, and it started the moment you were handed a notice of suspension. It did not ask your permission and it is not waiting for anybody to prove anything.
If you refused the breath test, or if you blew 0.15 or higher, South Carolina’s implied consent law gives you thirty days from that notice to request a contested case hearing. Let those thirty days run out and you do not lose an argument. You lose the hearing itself. It is simply gone.
The clock runs from the notice of suspension. Not from your first court date, and not from the day you finally get around to calling somebody.
That is the single most common, most expensive mistake I see. Somebody waits for their court date like a reasonable person would, and by the time we meet, the license hearing is no longer on the table.
It costs you nothing to find out where you stand. It can cost you six months of driving to guess.
Why these cases come apart
South Carolina requires your arrest on video.
This is the part that surprises people. Under S.C. Code § 56-5-2953, a DUI arrest in this state has to be recorded, once at the roadside and again at the breath test site, and that recording has to show specific things. Not most of them. Them.
- ROADSIDERecording begins no later than the blue lights. Not whenever the officer decides to start it.
- ROADSIDEAny field sobriety tests, exactly as they were given. There is a standardized way to administer them. There is also a wrong way.
- ROADSIDEThe arrest itself, and Miranda. What you were told, and precisely when you were told it.
- STATIONThe entire breath test procedure, beginning to end, including the operator’s conduct.
- STATIONThe full twenty-minute observation period before the test. All twenty minutes of it.
- STATIONYou being told you are being recorded, and that you may refuse the test.
Every line on that list is a place a case can break. And I will be straight with you about the limits of it, because you will hear otherwise from somebody: a missing video is not an automatic dismissal. The statute lets an officer file a sworn affidavit explaining a malfunction or an emergency, and a judge weighs the whole picture.
But it is a question that has to be asked. By somebody who knows what he is looking at when he watches it.
I know how the State builds these cases. I used to build them.
Before I opened my own office, I was an assistant solicitor right here in the Fifteenth Circuit. I sat at the other table. I know what a prosecutor sees when your file lands on the desk, which cases they are glad to take to trial, and which ones they would quietly rather not.
That is not a small thing, and it is not something a lawyer can pick up from a seminar. You learn it by doing the job.
And I have taught the test they gave you on the roadside.
I am SFST trained in standardized field sobriety testing, the same battery of tests the officer walked you through beside the road. Plenty of defense lawyers can say that much.
In 2010 I also earned a Certificate of Instruction for the NHTSA and IACP course in DWI Detection and Standardized Field Sobriety Testing, the same curriculum the officer who arrested you was trained on. I have stood at the front of that classroom and taught it.
That is the difference between watching your arrest video and reading it.
When you have taught the test, you are not guessing at whether it was given correctly. You know what the officer was supposed to say, in what order, how many times he was supposed to demonstrate it, and what he was supposed to write down. And you know what it means when the video shows something different.
A word about what I am not saying. I am not telling you your case has a defect, because I have not seen it yet. I am telling you that nobody can answer that question by worrying about it at three in the morning. It gets answered by pulling the file and watching the tape.
Let’s get started
Tell us what happened.
Fill this in and someone from our office will get back to you to arrange a time to sit down with Johnny. It is free, it is confidential, and you are under no obligation to hire anybody.
You will come away from that meeting knowing your license deadline, what you are actually facing, and what your options are. If this office is not the right fit for your situation, Johnny will tell you that too.
- 1 You send us the details A few fields, about a minute, and the guide downloads on the next page. Or call and skip the form. The phone is answered around the clock.
- 2 Our office gets back to you Someone reaches out to go over the basics and arrange a consultation time that fits your week.
- 3 You sit down with Johnny Free, confidential, no obligation. You leave knowing your license deadline and your real options.
- No fee for the consultation
- Confidential, and no obligation to hire
Free case review, and the guide
A few fields, about a minute. You get the Blue Lights guide to download straight away, and someone from our office will get back to you to set up your meeting with Johnny. Or call (843) 248-7135 and skip the form entirely.
By submitting this form you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Consent to marketing messages is not a condition of any service. Submitting this form does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Who you would be hiring
I am not from somewhere else.
My family has been in Horry County since the early 1700s. I grew up here, went to high school here, and went to Coastal Carolina, where I was the first officer commissioned through the university’s Army ROTC program. I served as a captain with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg.
After the Army I went to law school at the University of South Carolina, came home, and went to work as an assistant solicitor. I opened this firm more than thirty years ago and I have been defending ordinary people against the considerable power of the government ever since, in virtually every criminal and civil court on the Grand Strand.
I mention all of that for one reason. When you send in your details, someone from my office will get back to you and arrange a time for the two of us to sit down. That first meeting is with me. It costs you nothing, and you walk out of it under no obligation to hire anybody.
I have been doing this in these same courtrooms, in front of these same judges and solicitors, for three decades. Bring your paperwork and let me look at it.
- More than 30 years defending DUI charges in South Carolina Admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1992. Firm founded the following year.
- Former assistant solicitor, Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Prosecuted criminal cases before opening his own practice.
- SFST trained, plus Certificate of Instruction, NHTSA / IACP (2010) Issued after training participants in the DWI Detection & Standardized Field Sobriety Testing student course at Pawleys Island, South Carolina.
- National College for DUI Defense, Summer Session (2011) Completed the College’s intensive summer curriculum in DUI defense law, conducted at Harvard Law School. Member of the College.
- Founding member, DUI Defense Lawyers Association (2014) A national association dedicated to the defense of citizens accused of driving under the influence.
- South Carolina Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Active member and former board member.
- Captain, 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Army First officer commissioned through Coastal Carolina University’s Army ROTC program.
- Outstanding Alumnus of the Year, Coastal Carolina University (2024) Recognized by Coastal Carolina University for leadership and community service.
Two things for Johnny to rule on. (1) His role as Chairman of Horry
County Council is intentionally absent from this page. See the note in the source
above for why, and have him decide. (2) There is no testimonial or case-result section
anywhere on this page, because I could not find a single reviewable rating or outcome I
was willing to put in print. Send real reviews or anonymized outcomes and I will build
that section properly. Search this file for TODO(proof).
