If you think that fate has singled you out, please understand that Driving Under the Influence charges are filed against thousands of Washington residents every year.  From elected officials to sports celebrities, DUI charges have happened to individuals in all walks of life.  Everyone can make a mistake; not everyone has the consequences of that mistake brought home to them. 

The following information is gleaned from a published newspaper account.  A court of law determines if, indeed, someone has broken the law.    Every person charged with DUI has a choice to make in how they want to own responsibility for why they were charged and how to lead their lives going forward.   

30,000 Washington Residents out of 220,000

Sadly, a study in 2006 found there were 30,000-plus Washington State residents who had been charged more than once since 2000 with DUI offenses.  Those 30,000 were evidently on the road having failed to learn from their first DUI.  They went out on the road and got pulled over a second time.  And of those, some 5000 have been pulled over 3 or more times.   A Seattle Times story recapping their analysis of court statistics from September 4^th of 2006 shows the mind-numbing facts about DUI in Washington State.  In that analysis the Times found  that there were 220,640 individuals who had been charged in those six years with DUI. That’s about 5% of Washington’s 4.4 million licensed drivers at that date.

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20060904&slug=dui04m