LAURA E. AKERS

  After an arrest for driving under the influence, the arresting officer will confiscate the arrestee's license and serving him or her with an order of suspension. The arrestee will be issued a temporary driver's license, and the individual then has 10 days within which to contact a local branch of the DMV's Office of Driver Safety and request a license suspension hearing.
  The DMV hearing is separate from criminal proceedings and might be delayed due to the backlog of cases and California's budget crisis that is causing DMV offices to be shut down one day per week. Once a hearing has been scheduled, a continued temporary driver's license ("stay of suspension") will be sent to the arrestee to enable them to drive until after the hearing.
   A DMV hearing can be heard telephonically or in person. The DMV hearing is held in a location as close as possible to the arrest. The San Diego Driver Safety Office is located at 9174 Sky Park Avenue, Suite 200, San Diego (858) 627-3901 or fax (858)627-3925.
   If you have not retained an attorney within 10 days of the arrest, you should contact the local Driver's Safety Office yourself, request a 5 day extension so you can get a DUI/DMV attorney specialist to review all arrest reports and toxicologist/lab results immediately.
   The hearing officer is, of course, an employee of the department—with little or no legal training. The most critical characteristic of this individual, however, is that the hearing officer wears two hats: both prosecutor and judge. learly, the deck is stacked; there is little chance of a fair and impartial hearing. The primary (and unstated) purpose of the hearing is to sustain the suspension. Nevertheless, an experienced DUI defense attorney has a good chance of winning reinstatement of the license.
Furthermore, armed with a tape recording of the hearing, good DUI lawyers have the ammunition with which to (1) file a writ with the superior court and (2) impeach the officer as witness at trial.