Maryland Drunk Driving Accident Lawyers: Your Claim Is Separate

How the two cases relate

• Different parties. The state prosecutes; you bring the civil claim.
• Different standards. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond reasonable doubt. A civil claim is decided on the balance of probabilities, which is why a claim can succeed even where a prosecution did not.
• Different outcomes. Criminal court can impose a sentence and may order restitution, which is generally limited and is not the same as compensation for your injuries.
• Different timelines. A criminal case can take a long time, and your civil deadline runs regardless.

Where there is a conviction, it is useful evidence. Where charges were dropped or never brought, the impairment can still be proven in the civil case.

Proving impairment in the civil case

• Chemical test results and the records behind them
• The police investigation: field sobriety testing, body camera footage, the officer’s observations and the arrest report
• Hospital records, including blood work drawn for treatment
• Witnesses, including anyone who saw the driving beforehand
• Receipts and card records, establishing where the driver had been
• Vehicle data, showing speed and braking
• The driving record, including prior offenses

Much of this sits with the police and the criminal court rather than with the insurer, and some of it has to be requested formally and promptly.

Punitive damages: what Maryland actually allows

This is the question people ask first, and the honest answer is not the one most expect. Maryland sets a high bar for punitive damages, requiring actual malice rather than recklessness — and Maryland courts have held that driving while intoxicated does not by itself meet that standard.

So a drunk driving claim is generally valued on compensatory damages: medical treatment, lost income and earning capacity, and the personal harm you suffered. We would rather say that plainly at the start than have you expect a punishment award the law does not provide here.

What the impairment does affect is everything else. It removes the fault argument that drives most Maryland claims, and it changes how an insurer assesses its own exposure at trial.

Why these claims start from a stronger position

In most Maryland injury claims the central battle is contributory negligence: if the insurer can pin any meaningful share of fault on you, the claim can fail completely.

A documented impaired driver makes that argument far harder to run. It does not make it disappear — expect an insurer to examine your speed, your lane position and whether you could have avoided the collision — but it starts the claim from a much better place than a disputed ordinary crash.

Where the money actually comes from

Impaired drivers are frequently underinsured, and some are uninsured, so identifying every available policy matters more here than in an ordinary claim:

• The at-fault driver’s liability coverage, first
• Your own [uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage](/uninsured-motorist-lawyer/), which is often where the real recovery comes from — and which has strict rules about settling with the at-fault insurer first
• Personal injury protection, which pays toward medical bills and lost wages regardless of fault
• A commercial policy, where the driver was working at the time

Do not accept the at-fault insurer’s policy-limit offer before speaking to your own insurer or to us. Signing that release can extinguish an underinsured claim worth considerably more.

Deadlines

Maryland generally allows three years from the crash to file a civil claim, and a death follows the wrongful death rules. That clock runs whatever stage the criminal case has reached.

Waiting for a prosecution to conclude before starting is one of the more common and more costly mistakes in these cases.