A timeline for a DUI case in York County is not one that is set in stone. You can take steps to either drag out the resolution of your DUI case or you can move it along faster. This can be useful for someone accused of DUI. There are a lot of reasons for this: you can take the extra time to find a new job, if your current job requires driving or if you will lose your job upon losing your transportation; you may accumulate extra vacation (on the first of the year or on your hiring anniversary) to use if you have to serve a jail sentence; to avoid trips or events that were planned in advance; or to be able to attend the birth of a child. There are a million reasons why this might be useful.

On the flip side, some people want to get the DUI consequences taken care of as soon as possible. Facing the music, if a conviction/plea or ARD is inevitable (a "dead to rights" type case), can let you get on with your life faster. When meeting with your attorney, you should discuss whether you want to move things along faster or whether you want to drag things out or whether you simply want to avoid certain dates, such as a planned vacation. 

Another consideration here in determining "What is the Timeline for a DUI?" is another question. Do you want to know when everything is done and your life has returned to normal, or do you want to know when you are likely to be sentenced? The questions are different, and the answer to the question of "When does my life return to normal?" depends on what type of DUI charge you have been accused of, whether you have had prior offenses, and what sort of punishment you will receive under your particular facts.

With all the preliminaries out of the way, the big question is "How long does this all take?" This answer will assume that you are a first time offender, and that you are eligible for ARD. If this is not your first offense, you probably already have some idea of how the process works, plus the facts get too complicated to put into a short website answer.

For a first-time offender who is ARD-eligible, the short answer is: In York, your DUI case will take anywhere from about a year to about a year and a half to resolve. Other counties have different rules for ARD, so this information is specific only to York County. Here is how the dates generally work:

• Every case starts with an arrest. To make it easy, we'll say you get stopped for a DUI and then you get arrested on the way home following a New Year's Eve party at the start of 2007. You will be taken that night to a police station for booking or to Central Booking at the courthouse where you will be booked and where a duty judge will take care of preliminary paperwork, like doing your preliminary arraignment, setting bail, and giving you a preliminary hearing notice. You may get your notice of your preliminary hearing in the mail, since the duty judge has a hard time setting hearings for other magisterial district judges with any accuracy - if you do get a date for a hearing, it will likely be moved.
• You will then (in most cases) be released to a friend or family member.
  
• Next, you should call a lawyer such as attorney Joseph N. Gothie, Esq., at (717) 848-8455. You will want to know if there are any defenses to your case and how you would be best off proceeding going forward.
• You should meet with your attorney as soon as possible.
• Your preliminary hearing is usually about a month or two after you are arrested. Since (in our example) you were arrested on January 1, 2007, you will probably have a preliminary hearing scheduled for some time in February of 2007.  The time lag will depend on how fast the police get the paperwork out the door of their office and which District Court the charges are filed in - some District Courts have much heavier case loads than others, and scheduling can be difficult depending on where you were arrested.

We assumed at the beginning that this is an ARD-type case (i.e. that you do not have a valid defense and that it is a first offense and that you qualify for ARD). At this stage you need to decide whether you want to drag out the process or whether you want to accelerate it. This should be discussed with your attorney, since decisions made at the front end will have an impact later on.

Assuming you want to move things along, after you meet with your attorney, you will want to:

• Have your attorney call the District Court where your preliminary hearing is scheduled so that the hearing can be waived. If you want to speed things up, you should waive your preliminary hearing, unless there is some question about whether you were stopped properly. Do not waive your preliminary hearing without talking to a lawyer first.
• If, after reviewing your case with an attorney, you have decided to waive your preliminary hearing, you will need to go to the Magisterial District Court (this used to be called the District Justie in PA) to sign some papers and waive your preliminary hearing. You must call ahead and schedule this. You'll usually need to wait a week or so to get in for your waiver.
  
• You will then receive your Notice of Arraignment , some paperwork related to a CRN (Court Reporting Network), and copies of bail paperwork, if that applies in your case.
• You will give your Notice of Arraignment to your attorney, who will prepare a Waiver of Arraignment for you. You will also give your attorney the information necessary to complete your ARD application, and he will get both of those submitted to the Courthouse. If you are really quick about it, the Waiver of Arraignment and the ARD application could, in theory, be submitted to the courthouse within a few weeks of your arrest. For our purposes here, we'll assume they get submitted on February 1, 2007.
  
• When your attorney has taken care of your arraignment and ARD paperwork, you will set up and complete a CRN appointment. This is required for all DUI cases, including ARD cases. It costs $50.00 and it is essentially a drug and alcohol assessment to see if treatment will be required as part of your sentence or ARD conditions.
• Next, you will wait approximately two to three months for your ARD application to get reviewed and approved. We'll assume that the application takes three months for approval, putting the approval date around May 1, 2007.
  
• When the application is approved, you will be scheduled to come into court about three months after the date of your ARD acceptance letter to attend an ARD admission. Under our example, you would probably get scheduled for ARD admission at the end of July, 2007. ARD amissions are run on Tuesdays once a month at the York County Judicial Center. They take place every 15 minutes, and you will appear in front of a judge, along with about 10-20 other people who are there to get admitted into ARD for their DUI cases.
• You will hand in your license at the ARD admission and you will be expected to execute a wage attachment document to let the ARD and court costs be deducted from your paycheck automatically. You can call the Clerk of Courts a few days before your ARD admission and ask for the full amount of your ARD and court costs so you can pay them in full to keep from having to do the wage attachment. Just bring proof of payment with you to the ARD admission.
• You will then be put under probationary supervision for anywhere from six months to twelve months. You can complete your ARD early under some circumstances. Your ARD supervision would likely end sometime between January 31, 2008 to somewhere around July 31, 2008.
  
• Upon successful completion of ARD, your record will be expunged. This takes a few months, usually.
  

From start to finish, your ARD case should take about 12-18 months to get wrapped up. That is if everything goes smoothly and you do everything you can to accelerate the process. You can slow things down somewhat if you want to. You can probably push out the ARD admission date by about three months with some perfectly permissible foot-dragging.

To discuss the best way to adjust this timeline under your circumstances, you should call attorney Joseph N. Gothie, Esq., at (717) 848-8455 to set up a free, confidential, no-risk consultation to discuss your case.

---

Share this page: