San Antonio Intoxication Assault & Manslaughter Attorney

Texas separates these offenses by the harm that resulted, not by how the driving looked.

Both charges rise a level when the person harmed was a peace officer, firefighter, or emergency medical services worker in the discharge of official duty, which pushes manslaughter into the 5 to 99-year range. Intoxication assault can also be elevated when the injury leaves someone in a persistent vegetative state.

Serious bodily injury has a specific legal meaning: an injury creating a substantial risk of death, or causing serious permanent disfigurement or lasting loss or impairment of a bodily member or organ. Whether an injury meets that definition is sometimes genuinely contested.

The statutes also reach boats and other watercraft, aircraft, and amusement rides, though those cases are rare.

Prosecutors do not have to prove you drove badly, and that surprises nearly everyone charged with these offenses.

Ordinary manslaughter requires proof of recklessness. These statutes do not. Once the State establishes that you were operating while intoxicated and that the intoxication caused the death or injury by accident or mistake, recklessness is presumed by law. There is no requirement to show you intended any harm, and no requirement to show erratic driving. The State's burden reduces to intoxication plus causation.

That narrowing cuts both ways. It removes some defenses and concentrates the entire case on two questions: was the person actually intoxicated, and did that intoxication cause this result? Those are the questions worth fighting.

Almost every one of these cases turns on a blood test, and there is more room to challenge that test than most people are told.

Two different samples often exist. Police obtain what practitioners call legal blood, drawn for the investigation. Hospitals draw medical blood for treatment. They are taken at different times, handled under different standards, and tested by different methods, and they do not always agree.

You may read elsewhere that a blood draw is simply mandatory when a crash causes death or serious injury. That is no longer accurate. The Supreme Court held in Missouri v. McNeely that alcohol leaving the bloodstream is not by itself an emergency justifying a warrantless draw, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held in State v. Villarreal that taking blood without a warrant under the implied-consent statute violates the Fourth Amendment.

Officers now need a warrant or genuine exigent circumstances even in these cases. That means the warrant affidavit, how it was obtained, and how the draw was carried out are all open to challenge, and suppressed blood changes a case completely.

Where the sample survives that challenge, the analysis itself remains contestable: chain of custody, storage temperature, fermentation in the vial, the phlebotomist's technique, the lab's methodology, and whether the reported figure reflects your level at the time of driving rather than hours later.

Crashes usually have more than one cause, and Texas law recognizes that.

Penal Code § 6.04 addresses concurrent causation. When something other than your conduct contributed to the outcome, and that other cause was clearly sufficient on its own while your conduct was clearly insufficient, you cannot be held criminally responsible for the result. Reaching that instruction requires evidence, and developing that evidence is investigative work.

The other causes can take many forms. The other driver may have been impaired, speeding, drifting, or running a light. A vehicle may have failed. Road design, missing signage, or weather may have contributed. In some cases, the injury was survivable and the cause of death traces to treatment that followed, or to a decision made much later about life support.

None of this is about assigning blame to someone who was hurt. It is about the State proving that your conduct, rather than something else, produced the result. That is what the law requires, and it is frequently where these cases are actually won.

Evidence disappears quickly in a traffic homicide investigation, and once it is gone, nobody can recreate it.

Surveillance footage from nearby businesses is routinely overwritten within days. Vehicles get released, repaired, or scrapped before anyone examines the crush patterns, the airbag control module, or the mechanical condition. Skid marks fade, and debris fields are cleared. Witnesses become harder to locate, and their memories change.

Retaining counsel early lets us send preservation demands, secure the vehicles, and bring in an accident reconstruction analyst while the physical evidence still exists. The State began investigating on the night of the crash. Your defense team should be starting their investigation as soon as possible because starting our defense months later means you're already behind the eight ball.

Sentencing in these cases follows rules that shape strategy from the beginning.

Prosecutors routinely allege that the vehicle was a deadly weapon. When a court makes that finding, a judge cannot place you on community supervision, and parole eligibility requires serving half the sentence. A jury, however, can still recommend probation, and juries do so in these cases more often than people expect, particularly for someone with no record where one person was harmed and no intent existed. That is why deciding who assesses punishment is one of the most consequential choices in the case, and it is a decision we make together, with the reasoning laid out.

Probation here is demanding rather than lenient. It can carry a substantial jail term as a condition, hundreds of hours of community service, an alcohol education program with a filing deadline, evaluation and treatment, and years of reporting.

When more than one person died, the State can charge a separate count for each, and a judge may stack those sentences consecutively instead of running them together. The same applies when one person died, and another was seriously injured. Understanding that exposure early is what makes an informed decision possible.