California Criminal Lawyer Blog

A San Francisco woman was arrested and charged with suspicion of DUI after striking and injuring a pedestrian in the Richmond District, KTVU reports.

The accident comes as the Centers for Disease Control is reporting that drunken driving incidents have fallen 30 percent in the last five years. In 2010, they fell to the lowest mark in nearly 20 years, CBS News reports.

Charges of vehicular manslaughter in San Francisco and throughout California are serious and can lead to a prison sentence. If someone is convicted of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and they have a prior DUI conviction, that person can be charged with murder, since they presumably know the dangers of drunken driving.

This is a charge that is serious in its own right, but can be escalated to a major charge in short order. That's why hiring an experienced and dedicated San Francisco criminal defense lawyer to defend your rights and fight by your side is critical.

Any DUI charge is serious because it can lead to a huge hit to a person's reputation and hurt their chances of advancing in their career field or even finding a job if they are unemployed.

In this case, a 40-year-old woman was crossing Fulton Street at 20th Avenue in a crosswalk around 10 p.m. one Saturday when she was hit by a silver Volkswagen. The woman was taken to the hospital with a life-threatening skull fracture.

The 36-year-old driver, police said, stopped at the scene but was later arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence. While the woman only faces charges of suspicion of DUI at this point, the charges could be increased at any time. If the pedestrian's condition worsens or if she dies, she could face DUI-related vehicular manslaughter charges.

Her arrest comes as national numbers were recently released about the number of drivers drinking and driving on our roads. According to a new federal report, DUI incidents have fallen 30 percent in the last five years and are the lowest they've been in the last two decades.

Some predict that the poor economy has given people less money to spend on alcohol, while others believe people are staying home and drinking on the cheap rather than going to night clubs, restaurants and bars.

A 2010 telephone survey of 210,000 adults in the United States found that 1 in 50 said they have driven while intoxicated at least once in the previous month. That means about 4 million Americans drove while intoxicated in 2010. About 60 percent said they drove drunk just once, but some said they do it on a daily basis.

The responses equate to 112 million episodes of drunken driving in 2010, or 300,000 per day. That's still lower than in 2006, when 161 million incidents were estimated. The number of people killed in DUI accidents dropped from 11,711 in 2008 to 10,839 in 2009.