Drinking and driving can result in serious car accidents causing severe and fatal injuries. Alcohol impairs a person’s ability to operate a vehicle safely, often resulting in dangerous behavior like swerving, speeding, or wrong-way driving. This behavior often leads to collisions caused by drunk drivers, like a pedestrian hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk, striking a bicyclist, or another motorist who is observing safe driving techniques.
During one recent year, only 4.5 percent of Arizona’s traffic crashes were alcohol-related. However, alcohol-related crashes caused 34 percent of the state’s total traffic accident deaths.
If you have suffered serious injuries in a crash involving an alcohol-impaired driver, or if you have lost a family member in one of these crashes, it will be important to have an experienced legal team on your side.
A Sun City auto accident attorney from Mushkatel, Gobbato, & Kile, P.L.L.C. can offer you a high-level service, a diverse set of skills and experiences, and a strong understanding of how to handle a drunk driving accident case. Our goal will be to ease the stress you may be feeling after going through the traumatic experience of being injured or losing a loved one.
Please call or contact us online when you are ready to discuss your case in an initial confidential consultation.
How Can a Sun City Drunk Driving Lawyer Help You?
At Mushkatel, Gobbato, & Kile, P.L.L.C., we can bring more than 100 years of combined legal experience to your drinking and driving accident case. We can use that experience to perform a careful investigation of your case that involves.
How We Investigate A Drunk Driving Crash:
- Analyzing the crash scene
- Obtaining statements from eyewitnesses
- Reviewing police reports and criminal charges against the other driver
- Consulting with accident reconstruction and toxicology experts
- Determining where the driver obtained alcohol
One task will be to determine the role that a driver’s impairment played in your crash and to identify what parties should be held responsible for the harm you have suffered.
For instance, in some cases, it’s not only the driver who is liable for the physical, emotional, and financial injuries caused in an accident – a bar, restaurant, or store that sold alcohol to the driver (or anyone who provided alcohol to a minor) may be held responsible as well. If a drunk driver was working at the time of the crash, his or her employer may be sued.
We will prepare the strongest case possible for a settlement with the insurance companies involved in your case or, if needed, for a trial that seeks a verdict on your behalf. We are skilled negotiators and trial lawyers, and will aggressively protect your rights through all stages of your case.
What Should Know About Arizona Drunk Driving Laws?
If the driver who caused your crash was found to have violated Arizona’s drunk driving laws, then the driver would be deemed “negligent per se.” The focus of your case would turn to establish that the driver’s negligence caused your injuries. For this reason, it is important to understand Arizona DUI law, a drunk driving lawyer can help you with this.
In our state, it is against the law for a driver to be in actual physical control of a vehicle if:
- The driver has an alcohol concentration of 0.08 or higher within two hours of driving or being in actual physical control of the vehicle (0.04 if the driver is operating a commercial motor vehicle and has a commercial driver’s license, or CDL)
- The person is under the influence of alcohol, any drug, or any combination of alcohol and drugs and is impaired to the slightest degree.
- While there is any illegal drug or metabolite in the person’s body.
It follows that a driver’s impairment can be readily established through toxicology tests that establish the driver’s alcohol concentration. However, in some cases, you may need to present other evidence, including proof that the driver had:
- Red and/or glassy eyes
- Slurred speech
- A strong odor of alcohol
- Had been speeding, driving too slowly, drifting across lanes, driving on the wrong side of the road, or failing to stop at a stop sign or red light.
If a driver is under the age of 21 (the legal drinking age in Arizona), and he or she has any amount of alcohol in his or her body, then that driver is in violation of state law and could be found to be negligent per se as well.
Remember: Bringing a civil lawsuit against a drunk driver who caused your crash is separate and apart from any criminal actions against the driver. You may be able to pursue a claim for damages against the driver even if he or she is not convicted.
What Can You Recover in an Arizona Drunk Driving Accident Claim?
If you have been injured in a crash caused by a drunk driver in Arizona, you may seek damages that compensate you for:
- Reasonable and necessary past and future medical care and treatment
- Lost earnings and any decrease in future earning capacity
- Loss of enjoyment of life (or ability to participate in life’s activities as you did before the injury)
- Pain, suffering, discomfort, disability, and disfigurement
- Loss of love, care, affection, companionship, and other pleasures of your marital or parent-child relationship
If the drunk driving crash resulted in the loss of a loved one, you may seek different damages through a wrongful death claim, including:
- Pain, grief, sorrow, anguish, stress, shock and mental suffering
- The loss of the victim’s income and services
- Reasonable burial and funeral expenses
- Reasonable and necessary medical expenses that were incurred to treat the victim’s injury before his or her death
The purpose of these damages is to make you “whole” or as near as possible to the state you were in before the drunk driving accident harmed you or killed your loved one.
You may also be eligible to pursue a different type of damages called “punitive damages.” These damages are aimed at punishing the drunk driver and deterring that driver and others from engaging in similar misconduct in the future.
Punitive damages may be awarded where an at-fault driver “consciously pursued a course of conduct knowing that it created a substantial risk of significant harm to others,” such as driving while impaired. Evidence of a driver’s prior DUI convictions or drunk driving accidents may be factors.
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