Minnesota DWI Defense Blog

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

At the end of 2017 we started releasing some of the "under wraps" victories we had for our clients last year. And because the Vikings just keep winning, we thought it would be fun to compare these wins to the current rise of the Super Bowl contender Minnesota Vikings. Read More

We teased everyone last week that we were going to release some of the "under wraps" victories we've had for our clients over 2017. And because we're also currently suffering from a bad case of drinking the purple Kool-Aid, we thought it would be fun to compare these wins to the current rise of the soon-to-be-world-champion Minnesota Vikings. Read More

Getting a good result in a DWI case often involves going far beyond what most attorneys even consider as a defense. We've got a reputation for pioneering new defenses, which is a huge benefit to our clients. For the last few weeks in December, we're going to reveal some of the top defenses we've used to win cases for our clients -- how we were getting Ignition Interlock cases dismissed, how we can get felony DWI's dismissed, and how we are getting forfeited vehicles returned to our clients. Read More

On October 4, we held two arguments before the Minnesota Supreme Court, addressing the impact that Minnesota's unconstitutional Implied Consent Law will have on the drivers who either refused to submit to blood or urine tests, or agreed to those tests after being threatened with the crime of refusal. We posted a video of the first oral argument earlier -- here's the second one. Read More

While Tom Petty has moved on to a better place (and may he rest in peace) his lyrics are going to be with us forever. That includes the old gem "The Waiting Is The Hardest Part." And he was right . . . even if he wasn't exactly talking about "waiting" for a Supreme Court decision. Read More