Minnesota DWI Defense Blog

We proudly call ourselves “Minnesota’s Best-Trained DWI Lawyers” because we've gone above and beyond to develop our skills to give our clients a real advantage in court. Does that make us Minnesota’s Best DWI Lawyers? Maybe. Read about our training, education and work to decide for yourself. Read More

Getting charged with a DWI is stressful enough, but the trouble doesn’t end there for many. In Minnesota, a DWI charge can lead to vehicle forfeiture, adding another layer of complexity and potential financial loss to an already daunting situation. Read More

It rarely makes sense to hire the second best attorney for your case. The level of expertise that comes with board certification is particularly important for individuals with professional licenses, CDL drivers, or those whose driving privileges are critical to their livelihood such as pilots, doctors, and other health care providers, lawyers, those with security clearances), or if you are required to drive for your employment, travel to Canada, etc., the relief and confidence that comes with hi Read More

Last week, we told you about a big problem with how Minnesota's Ignition Interlock Program tries to measure breath alcohol. Today, we tell you exactly what's wrong, and how we can help get ignition interlock violations overturned. Read More

Are the private companies charged with providing services to Minnesota's Ignition Interlock Device Program (IIDP) cutting corners to produce unreliable results? Are drivers being penalized for "failing" breath samples on devices that are not actually calibrated to properly determine if a driver even "failed?" Read More

Last week, we had TWO major victories for our clients! Here’s how we did it. Read More

For quite some time, only pilots, CDL holders, physicians, international travelers, and those with security clearances had reason to be concerned about the consequences of a first-time DWI arrest. Now, everyone should be worried. Read More

When you’re looking for an answer to a tricky problem, people will often say that they’re having as much trouble as “looking for a needle in a haystack.” That’s a bad situation to be in . . . but what’s worse is when other people try to “help” you with your problem by doing nothing other than give you more hay, when what you really need is just a needle. Read More

This Thanksgiving season some of our current clients have a lot to celebrate: In the last month we have had three judges throw out our client’s breath test results because of our "source code" issue. Read More

"A PhD in DWI defense implies that we’re at the top of our game – that we are the experts in DWI defense." Read More

For the first time in over a decade, Minnesota is seeing defense attorneys fight with the State of Minnesota over access to the source code that governs almost every aspect of our fleet of breath test instruments. We're already getting license revocations thrown out of court -- here's how (and why). Read More

Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its decision in Olson v. 1999 Lexus, finding that Minnesota's DWI vehicle forfeiture law was unconstitutional. We've been waiting for this one for a while, and it was worth the wait. Our client gets her vehicle back, and Minnesota's laws just got a little more fair. Here's our reading of the decision. Read More

Our ten-year blog-aversary (we've been practicing criminal defense far longer than 10 years) came and went without much fanfare, but as this year draws to a close we make note of that anniversary now. In our first blog post we said the purpose of the blog was "to share information and promote excellence." We believe we've done that and continue to do so. Read More

Winning a DWI case for our clients in Minnesota sometimes requires us to take hard look at "bad" case law, find a way to flip those bad cases on their heads, and hopefully end up creating new defenses for both our current clients and future clients. Here's one example, where we obtained two "not guilty" verdicts for clients who were twice the legal limit. Read More

We've said it before, and we'll say it again -- we only post a fraction of our victories on this website. We're primarily attorneys, not website developers, and we know that no matter how hard we work, we can always find a way to be more creative, more aggressive, and craft new ways to help our clients out of a bad situation. Here are three examples. Read More

This is old news to our clients but new news to the public: Dan Koewler, who has been with Ramsay Law Firm since 2008, is now publicly a partner with Ramsay Law Firm! He has been integral to our growth and our successes since he first started out as an attorney, and we're proud to have him as a partner. Read More

Every now that then we get solicited to publish a "guest post" by someone. To date, we've always said "thank you, but no thanks." Today we break that rule -- this one was so well written that we couldn't say no. Here it is, unedited. Read More

This morning, the Minnesota Supreme Court issued two long awaited decisions regarding the potential Due Process implications for Minnesota's old Implied Consent Advisory. These two opinions provided some answers, raised some additional questions, and left a bit of extra work for the future. Read More

Today, the Minnesota Court of Appeals struck down a significant portion of Minnesota's DWI Vehicle-Forfeiture Law as unconstitutional, specifically concluding that it violates the due process rights of drivers and innocent owners alike. In cases like these, justice delayed really does mean that justice is denied. Read More

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) trains its employees to testify in court that the DataMaster DMT (used in the majority of DWI arrests in Minnesota) is designed to give drivers the "benefit of the doubt." They "truncate" the breath test results, they take the "lower" of two breath samples, they have all sorts of "filters" to screen out false positive tests. Think of how absurd would it be if the machine keeps measuring someone's breath, and keeps getting a result that is below Read More