A DUI stop in South Carolina often starts with something else, like a speeding stop, and can turn into a roadside investigation involving field sobriety tests, an arrest, and a towed car. This post walks through how one DUI case unfolded, from the initial stop through trial, using Greg McCollum’s own explanation of what happened and what South Carolina law requires along the way.
Frequently Asked Questions
What if you’re pulled over for DUI in Charleston, South Carolina?
Greg McCollum, founder of the Complete Legal Defense Team, tells the story of Tim. Tim was driving, late at night, on a divided highway in the Myrtle Beach area, coming into Myrtle Beach. As he drove along, the speed limit dropped, and a trooper heading the opposite direction clocked him speeding.
The trooper had to go a little further down the highway, turn around, and come back, and that gap matters in court because the trooper has to answer how he knows he stopped the right car. Was there something about that car that stood out? Did he lose sight of it?
Anytime a trooper loses sight of a car, especially for a long stretch, there’s really not much evidence they got the right one. Because it took a while to catch up, the trooper pulled Tim over right away.
Normally, if a trooper thinks something suspicious is going on, he’ll turn around, catch up, get behind the driver fairly close but not right on the bumper, and start looking for clues. Speeding is a basis to pull somebody over, and troopers can certainly do a DUI investigation from there, they do it every day, but in this case the trooper didn’t get behind Tim and observe his driving first.
Had he done that, he probably would have had no real reason to pull him over, though he could still pull him over for the speeding itself.
When the trooper pulled him over, he approached with his blue lights flashing and asked for Tim’s driver’s license, vehicle registration, and insurance information, the three things South Carolina requires drivers to have. At that point, Tim was being investigated for DUI, and the trooper was looking to gather evidence.
How Tim located those items mattered: fumbling for a license, appearing confused or disoriented, or being unable to locate paperwork are the kinds of things that show up in a police report and get built into a case.
The trooper then had Tim step out for field sobriety tests. One in particular stands out: officers hold up a pen and ask a driver to follow it with their eyes, the horizontal gaze nystagmus test. Greg calls it complete junk science, recalling that he once asked his ophthalmologist about it and the doctor just looked at him in disbelief that it’s used on the roadside to gauge intoxication.
The other tests are the walk and turn, nine steps heel to toe with your hands at your side while cars whiz by and blue lights flash, and the one leg stand, where you hold one foot 8 to 10 inches off the ground, point your toe, and keep your hands at your side, a very unnatural position to try to balance in.
A lot of people now decline these tests outright, which usually leads to arrest anyway, since in practice no one’s ever passed them well enough on the roadside to avoid it. And from the officer’s position, letting someone go only to have them injure someone later means the officer gets blamed for not doing his job.
So there’s little for a trooper to gain by releasing someone at that point, the safer move is to arrest. That’s what happened to Tim. Hands on the hood, cuffed behind his back, then placed in the front of the patrol car with a camera on him, standard practice in South Carolina.
The trooper’s dash camera had already been running from the moment he was behind Tim’s car, even before catching up, so the driving itself was on record too. The approach to the car, the sobriety tests, all of it was caught on camera, building the case. Tim was handcuffed, taken to jail, and had his car towed.
He spent the night in jail, then had to locate his car, sort out the towing bill, and handle all of it without a driver’s license the next day. A terrible situation, and one that plays out the same way for a lot of people.
Once the firm reviewed the evidence in Tim’s case, they felt he looked good on the video, and that’s often what a case comes down to: how someone looks on camera, and whether there’s an explanation if they don’t. In this jurisdiction, there’s generally little incentive to plead guilty to a DUI, since a trial runs about three quarters of a day and a conviction after trial carries the same outcome as a guilty plea.
The real difference is sitting through the trial itself, so unless there’s some other serious factor at play, the firm typically takes these cases to trial.
Speeding on its own isn’t an indication of DUI, Greg argued at trial, if anything, driving fast while staying in your lane and driving smoothly points the other way, toward someone who’s able to drive and isn’t impaired. What actually kills people isn’t drinking and driving by itself, he argued, it’s high-speed collisions, hitting a fixed object or rolling a car at speed, regardless of whether alcohol was involved.
At trial, the defense worked to establish time and distance: if the trooper clocked Tim at 60 miles per hour, that’s a mile a minute, and if it took him 30 seconds to slow down, cross the median, wait for traffic, and turn back around, Tim would have been a half mile down the road by then.
Drawing on his own background as a former DUI prosecutor who worked with dozens of troopers, Greg described many of them as drawn to fast, high-performance patrol cars, and to minimize how long it took to catch Tim, the trooper admitted he’d reached speeds over 100 miles an hour on a road posted at 45.
Greg argued to the jury that what the trooper did that night was far more dangerous than anything Tim had done, since a crash at that speed would likely have been fatal.
He offered the jury a thought experiment: picture a town where everyone’s driving drunk but nobody goes over 10 or 12 miles an hour, people running into bushes and ditches and each other like bumper cars, but nobody getting hurt, against what the trooper did just to catch someone for speeding.
The jury agreed, and Tim was found not guilty, sparing him the license suspension, the insurance penalty, a restricted license, and weeks of mandatory ADSAP classes.
This is routine work for the firm, just one example among the 75 to 100 DUI cases they handle each year. If a client’s license is suspended, the firm moves to get a hearing scheduled within a day or two and works to get the license restored until that hearing happens. The firm pays the filing fee itself, unlike some lawyers, and handles the process of gathering evidence toward avoiding a DUI conviction and its consequences.
A DUI conviction stays on a South Carolina driving record for 10 years, and a South Carolina license carries a letter flagging a prior DUI to any trooper who checks the number, which tends to trigger closer scrutiny down the road.
Most of the firm’s clients, according to Greg, have never been arrested before, typically 70 to 75 percent, and the goal is to make the experience as manageable as possible while working toward the strongest outcome the facts allow.
Greg McCollum has practiced criminal defense in South Carolina for roughly 30 years and previously worked as a DUI prosecutor, which he says gives him insight into how troopers build these cases. That background shapes how the Complete Legal Defense Team approaches DUI stops in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, from questioning how a stop was made to challenging the evidence gathered on the roadside.
If you have questions about DUI charges in South Carolina, call the Greg McCollum Complete Legal Defense Team at (843) 626-5480. Consultations are confidential.
