DUI Question (Not Seeking Legal Advice)

[Crafter_Man]

@dougrb

I got a DUI on an ATV two months ago and have an “administrative hearing” in a week on whether I lose my License. My lawyer says no. This is in Kansas. I will post back in a week.

Public road or private property?

[dougrb]

@Crafter_Man

Public road or private property?

Public

[ENugent]

Lowering the Bar has done a whole series on this question.

[Mdcastle]

You can get a DUI driving a La-Z-Boy recliner with a motor on and crashing it.

Man Pleads To La-Z-Boy DWI

[GreasyJack]

@jtgain

It seems, though, that such a thing goes against the spirit of a DL suspension for DUI. The idea is that a driver’s license is a privilege not to be abused. By operating a car while you are drunk, you have abused that privilege and we will take away that license for a little while as punishment.

But if you are driving a bicycle, a lawn tractor or anything else not requiring a driver’s license to operate, there is no underlying privilege that you are abusing (other than the law itself, which there are punishments for) and to take away a driver’s license when the bad activity you are doing is not associated with that license seems to lose its logical connection.

I suspect what’s going on is that back when many states’ DUI statutes were written, drunk driving was seen as merely a nuisance and was only punishable by a slap-on-the-wrist. So there wasn’t really any reason to separate car from bicycle, horse, etc. But as drunk driving has become recognized as more of an issue, they’ve slowly ratcheted up the penalties without bothering to go back and change the definition to exclude the various low-speed vehicles that realistically are just a nuisance and only deserve the slap-on-the-wrist proscribed by the original statute.

[Loach]

@GreasyJack

It seems to me that the question the OP is asking isn’t so much whether you can get a DUI while driving/riding something other than a highway-legal vehicle (which seems to be the question everyone is answering), but whether the consequences applied to your driver’s license would be the same as if you’d been caught in a car.

I’d guess they probably would be, although perhaps if you’re somewhere that judges still have a large amount of leeway in DUI sentencing you might get off a little lighter. How your car insurance company would view it is another issue, although I imagine they probably wouldn’t be very forgiving either.

If I wasn’t clear in my post, in my state you can get a dwi while operating anything propelled by a motor on land (boats are a different statute). It can be enforced on public or private property. The penalties do not change.