Everything the State has against you came out of a single decision. An officer on Roosevelt Road, or Butterfield, or one of the routes feeding I-355, decided there was a reason to pull your car over. What the officer says was on your breath, what you said at the window, how you did on the roadside tests, the number off the machine at the station, none of it exists without that moment.
Which is why the first question in a DUI case is not what the evidence shows. It is whether the officer was allowed to stop you, whether they were allowed to keep you there as long as they did, and whether what they had at the end of it was enough to arrest you. Those are three separate questions with three separate answers.
What to know
- An officer needs reasonable suspicion, based on something specific, before pulling you over
- A stop can become unlawful by running too long, even if it started out lawfully
- Reasonable suspicion to stop you is a lower bar than probable cause to arrest you
- Lombard sits entirely within DuPage County, so cases here are typically heard in Wheaton
- Your license suspension takes effect on the 46th day after arrest unless a petition is filed
What Happens After a DUI Arrest in Lombard
The Stop
Inside the village, most stops are made by the Lombard Police Department. On I-355, along the western edge, they are usually made by the Illinois State Police. Either way the officer has to be able to say what brought their attention to your car in the first place, and it has to be something they can put in a report.
The Arrest, the Testing, and Your License
What follows is quick. Questions at the window, roadside sobriety testing, a portable breath device, then transport for the evidentiary test that carries weight in court. Under 625 ILCS 5/11-501.1, an officer with probable cause can require a breath, blood, or urine sample after an arrest, and a refusal brings a longer suspension than a failed test.
The license case starts that night and runs on its own schedule. Anyone facing a DUI charge in DuPage County is fighting on two fronts from the beginning.
The Clock Starts at the Arrest, Not the Court Date
Your suspension takes effect on the 46th day after the arrest whether or not you have seen a judge. Keeping your license past that date means a petition has to be on file before it arrives.
Where a Lombard Case is Heard
Lombard sits entirely within DuPage County. Some neighboring communities straddle a county line, which raises a real question about which courthouse and which prosecutor ends up with the file. Lombard does not have that problem. Cases arising in the village are typically heard at the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton, home of the 18th Judicial Circuit, a short drive from the village and from our office on Butterfield Road in Oakbrook Terrace.
Have the Stop Reviewed Before Anything Else
Most of what will decide your case was recorded before you ever reach a courtroom.
Or call us directly: (630) 261-9098
What an Officer Needs Before Pulling You Over
A traffic stop is a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. That is not a technicality, it is the reason an officer cannot pull you over on instinct. He needs reasonable suspicion, and reasonable suspicion has to rest on specific facts the officer can articulate, not on a feeling.
In practice that means something observable came first:
- Drifting over a lane line
- A speed
- A burned out light or an expired plate
- A stop sign that got rolled through
- A turn taken without a signal
What does not get there on its own is just as important. The hour is not reasonable suspicion. Leaving an area with bars at closing time is not reasonable suspicion. Driving unusually carefully is not reasonable suspicion, though officers do write it down. Neither is a sense that a car or a driver looks out of place. Something specific has to come first, and it has to appear in the report, because the report is what the officer will be held to later.
1
To Stop You
An officer needs reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation or of impaired driving, based on something specific they observed before the stop began.
2
To Arrest You
An officer needs probable cause, a higher standard, built from the stop, the conversation at the window, the roadside tests, and whatever the cameras recorded.
How Long a Stop Is Allowed to Last
A stop that begins lawfully does not stay lawful forever. This is the part most people never think about, and it is often where a DUI case is actually vulnerable.
A routine traffic stop is measured by its mission, meaning the reason the officer pulled you over and the safety tasks that go with it: checking your license, running the plate, writing the citation. In Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348 (2015), the Supreme Court held that authority for the seizure ends when those tasks are completed, or reasonably should have been. A stop prolonged beyond that point, without new reasonable suspicion to justify the extension, is unlawful.
The Court rejected the argument that an officer who works quickly earns extra time for an unrelated investigation. What matters is what the officer actually did and how long it took, not whether they could have been slower. The same principle came out of an Illinois case a decade earlier, Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005).
This matters in a DUI because the two things frequently come apart. An officer stops a car for an equipment violation, and twenty five minutes later the driver is standing on the shoulder doing balance tests. Somewhere in there the traffic stop ended and a DUI investigation began, and the question is whether the officer had developed genuine reasonable suspicion of impairment before they made that turn, or whether they were fishing.
Two Different Clocks
The question is not only whether the officer had a reason to stop you. It is whether they still had a reason to be keeping you there at minute fifteen. Those can have different answers in the same stop.
When a Stop Becomes an Arrest
Probable cause is a higher standard than reasonable suspicion, and it is what an officer needs before arresting you for DUI. It gets built out of the pieces: an odor, bloodshot eyes, an admission to drinking, the way you handled your documents, how the roadside tests went.
Several of those pieces are softer than they look on paper. Field sobriety tests are generally voluntary, and they are scored by the same officer who already suspects you. An admission to one drink is not an admission to impairment. An odor establishes that alcohol was consumed, not how much or when.
The Lombard Checkpoint That Reached the Supreme Court
Lombard has an unusual place in American Fourth Amendment law. In August 1997 a driver struck and killed a 70 year old bicyclist on a Lombard highway and did not stop. About a week later, at the same location and the same time of night, Lombard police set up a checkpoint, stopped each car briefly, and asked the people inside whether they had seen anything there the previous weekend. Robert Lidster drove toward it in a minivan, swerved, and was arrested for DUI.
The case reached the United States Supreme Court, which held in Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419 (2004) that a checkpoint asking drivers about someone else’s crime is treated differently from one looking for evidence of wrongdoing by the drivers being stopped.
Everything above this section is about ordinary stops, where an officer picks out one car for a reason. Checkpoint stops work on entirely different principles, because officers stop cars without any suspicion about the individual driver at all, and a separate set of factors decides whether the checkpoint itself was lawful. Those factors, and what they mean for a case, are set out in our guide to Illinois DUI checkpoints.
What Gets Reviewed After a Lombard Stop
None of this is visible from the citation. It lives in the narrative report, the squad and body camera video, the dispatch log with its timestamps, and the maintenance and calibration records for the breath instrument.
The timestamps do a lot of work. They are what turns a vague sense that the stop went on too long into a measurable question about when the traffic tasks were finished and when the DUI investigation started. The video does the rest, because an officer’s written description of a driver’s balance and speech and an actual recording of them do not always match.
Where a stop was unlawful, or a detention ran past its justification, the remedy is suppression. The officer’s observations, your statements, the roadside test results, and the breath reading can all be excluded as products of that stop. Without them the State may have no case left to put on. That is one of several ways a DUI case comes apart, and it applies whether you are facing a first DUI offense or something more serious.
Talk to a Lombard DUI Lawyer
Patrick Weiland spent nearly ten years as an Assistant State’s Attorney in DuPage County, where he supervised the felony trial division, before he began defending these cases. That background gives him no influence over any officer, prosecutor, or judge. What it gives him is a working knowledge of how a DUI report gets written, what an officer is trained to record, and what tends to be missing from the file when the stop was thin to begin with.
Your first consultation is free. Bring the citation and the notice of suspension you were handed the night of the arrest.