As a DUI School, we speak with our students often about their circumstances and what lead to them driving drunk. They range from your average, but unfortunate “I had one beer too many and didn’t realize I was drunk” to the extreme of crashing their car into their own home while drunk. But, the question of whether someone sleeping off their drunkenness in the backseat of their car should be charged with a DUI is a different question.

Nevada law test hello test (known as the Nevada Revised Statutes) states that if a drivers keys are within their grasp as a driver and their is alcohol in their system they can be charged with a DUI. Even asleep in the backseat of a car turned off with the keys within reaching distance of the occupant of the car, an officer has full legal authority to arrest and charge a defendant with a DUI. If you decided to sleep in your car due to being too intoxicated, 123 DUI Online recommends keeping your keys in the dashboard to have them completely & legally out of reach.

Photo of a drunk driving conviction

The consequences of a DUI conviction are long lasting and far reaching, which includes: a license suspension, attending Nevada DUI school classes and Alcoholic Anonymous meetings attendance, but dependant on the BAC (blood alcohol content) more severe consequences can include license revocation, ignition interlock device installation, and the permanent mark of a DUI in background checks causing rejected job applications & raised insurance rates.

For a DUI arrest to occur, the keys to the car must be within the suspects reach and alcohol to be present within their system. This is to aid for intent based arrests such as the police finding someone drunk parked on the side of the road or preparing the leave the parking lot of a bar.

The legal BAC has no bearing as well, with a blood alcohol content (BAC) below the legal limit of .07% can still result in a reckless driving conviction. In Nevada, officers can arrest drivers below the legal BAC by charging the  defendant with a reckless driving charge as long as there is alcohol in the suspect’s systems as it is at the officer’s discretion as defined in the Nevada Revised Statutes.

man arrested for a DUI

It can be abused however, when someone with no money for a cab home attempts to spend the night in the backseat of their car in order to sober up, only to find a flashlight shining through the window and a pair of handcuffs around their wrist for drunk driving. Police and Courts receive a portion of their budget from arrest fines and fees, leading to numbers based arrest approach unfortunately due to a financial incentive or even officers conspiring to to fabricate DUI charges as shown in the video below that the ACLU is currently fighting.

If this article was only legal theory speculation the topic wouldn’t be so urgent, but having spoken to students of our own as just a DUI school and the numerous news stories such as This one or another story here or this news article show a consistent pattern of police arrests for driving drunk while the defendant was attempting quite obviously to be doing the opposite as notated in the police reports.

Nevada DUI Arrests

Police are the thin blue line dividing civilization from anarchy, but when the enforcement of the law receives a financial incentive, focuses can shift leading to an unbalanced law, the exact opposite of what the justice system is meant to accomplish. There is no easy solution to a numbers based law enforcement system, where small arrests and traffic tickets are given priority over preventing major, harm creating crimes.

But, it can begin with you, writing to your state and local representatives, asking for changes in our justice system. Because a court’s budget should not be determined the amount of drunk driving arrests the police make or the amount of Nevada DUI class attendees there are given the Las Vegas Justice Court has a profit sharing partnership with a court education business (the focus of our next blog post)