Kohn & Yager, LLC has opened an Athens office. The address is 320 East Clayton Street, Suite 435, Athens, GA 30601, a two-block walk from the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse. Cory Yager is the attorney working out of it. The work is the criminal docket: arrests, warrants, misdemeanors and felonies charged inside Athens-Clarke County. Our Athens criminal law practice now has a street address downtown rather than a phone number in another county.
What an Arrest in Athens-Clarke County Leads To
The first question people ask after an Athens-Clarke County arrest is almost never about the maximum penalty. It is about where the case goes. Athens-Clarke County operates as a unified government, and a charge filed inside it can be heard in any one of three courts. Which court has the case matters. It decides whether a jury is available, who prosecutes it, and what any offered deal is really worth.
Athens Municipal Court. The Municipal Court of Athens-Clarke County moves roughly 35,000 cases a year. Its jurisdiction covers violations of the county’s own ordinances plus state traffic misdemeanors, DUI among them. It does not empanel juries. Preserving a jury trial means filing a timely written demand and moving the case out. A plea entered at the first appearance closes that door for good.
State Court of Athens-Clarke County. The State Court hears misdemeanor criminal cases. Those include transferred DUI charges, high-and-aggravated misdemeanors, and the ordinary body of an Athens docket built around impaired driving, traffic offenses, family violence and theft. It is where a misdemeanor jury trial in this county is actually tried. The solicitor-general’s office prosecutes there.
Superior Court of the Western Judicial Circuit. Clarke and Oconee counties together make up the Western Judicial Circuit. Under the Georgia Constitution, felony jurisdiction belongs only to its Superior Court. So a felony theft, a felony battery, a distribution charge or a fourth-offense DUI is heard there and prosecuted by the district attorney.
Two clocks start at the arrest itself. A person taken into custody on a warrant must be brought before a judicial officer within 72 hours of the arrest. A person arrested without a warrant must be carried before a judicial officer within 48 hours, or released. Both are outer limits rather than schedules. Neither one takes the place of a bond motion filed by your lawyer.
The Charges a College Town Produces
Athens is a small city with a large university inside it, and the criminal docket reflects that. A large share of the misdemeanor cases charged here involve people in their late teens and early twenties. Many are enrolled at the University of Georgia. Most are standing in a courtroom for the first time. The charges recur in a narrow band.
Underage possession of alcohol. Georgia law makes it unlawful for a person under 21 to purchase, attempt to purchase, or knowingly possess an alcoholic beverage. A first conviction of that particular prohibition is a misdemeanor punished by not more than six months of imprisonment or a fine of not more than $300, or both. The provision worth knowing sits in the same Code section. Where the accused has no prior alcohol offense of any kind, the court may defer further proceedings and impose probation. That takes the person’s consent, and no judgment of guilt is entered. When the terms are met, the court discharges the person and dismisses the proceedings. Whether that route is offered, and whether it comes before or after a plea, is a matter of advocacy. A minor in possession Athens GA charge is not a fixed outcome. Our MIP and underage drinking page goes through how these cases are contested.
Fake identification. The same laminated card can be charged two ways. Misrepresenting one’s identity or using false identification to obtain alcohol is prohibited by the underage drinking statute itself. Separately, knowingly possessing, displaying or using a false, fictitious, fraudulent or altered identification document is its own offense. The grade turns on which subsection the State selects. Say a person under 21 uses the document to get into an age-restricted facility, or to buy an age-restricted consumable. That is a misdemeanor on a first conviction. On a second it is a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature. Charged instead under the general possession provision, a second offense is a felony carrying up to three years and a fine of up to $25,000. The charging decision, not the conduct, drives the exposure. And a charging decision can be argued.
Marijuana possession. Possession of one ounce or less is a misdemeanor punished by imprisonment for up to 12 months, a fine of up to $1,000, or both. The same Code section carries a conditional discharge for a person with no prior drug conviction. That means probation before adjudication, and dismissal on completion. It may be used only once with respect to any person. Spending that one use on a small possession case at nineteen is a decision a client should make knowingly, not discover afterward. We cover the interaction between cannabis, impairment and driving on our Georgia marijuana laws page. An Athens GA marijuana possession lawyer should also be looking hard at the stop and the search that produced the contraband.
Public intoxication and disorderly conduct. Neither offense is as broad as an arrest report tends to suggest. Public drunkenness takes more than being drunk in a public place. The condition must be made manifest by boisterousness, by an indecent condition or act, or by vulgar, profane, loud or unbecoming language. Disorderly conduct reaches violent or tumultuous conduct that places another person in reasonable fear for life, limb, health or property. It also reaches unprovoked fighting words, and obscene language aimed at a child under 14. Both are misdemeanors. Both statutes also leave county and municipal ordinance power intact. That is why an Athens GA disorderly conduct lawyer so often finds the same conduct charged as a local ordinance violation in Municipal Court. Our disorderly conduct and public intoxication page works through the elements.
Shoplifting and theft. Theft by shoplifting is graded by value and by history. Where the merchandise is $500 or less in value, the offense is punished as a misdemeanor; above $500 it is a felony carrying one to ten years. The escalation is the part that surprises people. A second shoplifting conviction requires a fine of not less than $500 that may not be suspended or probated. A third requires imprisonment of not less than 30 days, or 120 days in a probation detention center or on monitored house arrest. That confinement cannot be suspended, probated, deferred or withheld. A fourth is a felony punishable by one to ten years, with the first year not suspendable. Our Georgia shoplifting defense page covers the misdemeanor case in more depth.
Simple battery, battery and family violence. Simple battery is intentional physical contact of an insulting or provoking nature, or intentionally causing physical harm. It is punished as a misdemeanor unless a listed aggravator applies. One of those aggravators is the relationship between the parties. Committed between household members, simple battery is punished as a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature. Battery, which requires substantial physical harm or visible bodily harm, becomes family violence battery when it happens between household members. A first family violence battery conviction is a misdemeanor. A second or subsequent one, against the same victim or a different one, is a felony punishable by one to five years. Two people who once shared an apartment can fall inside the household-member definition. That is how a single argument in a rental near campus turns into a case with a felony attached to the next one. Our simple battery page and our family violence practice set out the defenses.
DUI. Impaired driving is one item on this list rather than the subject of it. But it carries a deadline nothing else here does, because the license suspension runs on its own track. The Department of Driver Services has to receive a written hearing request, together with a $150 filing fee, no later than 30 days after the notice of suspension is served. Miss it and the hearing right is deemed waived. Taking an ignition interlock device limited driving permit instead waives that same hearing. Our Georgia DUI defense section treats the criminal case and the license case separately, because they are separate cases.
Where a statute names an offense a misdemeanor without fixing its own punishment, the general rule supplies one: a fine of up to $1,000, confinement for a total term of up to 12 months, or both.
Why a Misdemeanor Costs a Student More
A fine gets paid and forgotten. A conviction does not. Think of someone who has not yet applied to graduate school, sat for a licensing board, filled out a bar application or answered a federal employment questionnaire. For that person, the record is the sentence. Georgia gives a court several ways to avoid creating one. Each has its own eligibility rule, and its own moment at which it has to be raised.
The first offender treatment is open to a defendant who has not previously been convicted of a felony. On a guilty verdict or plea, and before an adjudication of guilt, the court may defer further proceedings. It may impose probation or a term of confinement instead. That takes the defendant’s consent. On completing it, the defendant is exonerated of guilt and stands discharged as a matter of law. Violate the terms, or pick up another conviction during the sentence, and the court may enter the adjudication and sentence as it otherwise would have. The alcohol statute and the controlled substances statute each carry a separate deferral of their own. The drug conditional discharge may be used only once. Deciding which of these to spend, and on which case, is a decision with a long tail.
Separate from all of it is restriction of criminal history record information. That confines the record of a particular offense to judicial officials and criminal justice agencies. It is then no longer available to private employers and landlords. Restriction is not automatic, it does not reach every disposition, and someone has to ask for it. Our record restriction and expungement page explains which dispositions qualify.
A university’s own student conduct process runs on its own track, on its own timetable, and answers to nobody in the courthouse. Statements made in that setting do not stay in that setting. What a student says to an investigator, a resident assistant or a campus officer can end up in the criminal file. Coordinating the two proceedings is part of defending UGA student criminal charges, not an afterthought to it.
The First Two Weeks After an Athens-Clarke County Arrest
- Get the bond and its conditions right. Conditions imposed at a first appearance are far easier to shape at the outset than to change later. That is especially true of no-contact and stay-away conditions in a family violence case.
- Calendar the license deadline. Where a DUI arrest produced a notice of suspension, the 30-day window runs from service of that notice. It cannot be extended.
- Collect what disappears. Bar and retail surveillance is overwritten on short cycles. Ask in writing, right away, for body-worn and dash camera recordings, dispatch logs, incident reports, and the name of every witness who was standing there.
- Say nothing about the facts to anyone. That includes group chats, social media, roommates and campus officials. It is the most common source of evidence against a young defendant.
- Do not resolve the case at arraignment. The deferral and diversion programs described above are hardest to obtain after a plea has already been entered.
Cory Yager, the Attorney in the Athens Office
Cory Yager has been defending criminal cases in Athens-Clarke County, and across the rest of Georgia, since 2007. His first nine-plus years of working life were spent in uniform instead. He served first with the Cobb County Police Department, then with the City of Roswell Police Department. His State Bar of Georgia ICLE speaker profile records thousands of impaired-driving arrests over that stretch, along with assignments investigating fatal and serious-injury collisions.
At Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School he finished as the second-highest honor graduate in his class. He earned all of it while he was still pulling patrol shifts in Roswell. He passed the Bar examination on his first attempt and took the oath as a member of the State Bar of Georgia in October 2007. A week after that he was practicing criminal defense with William C. Head. He is a partner alongside Larry Kohn today, and his attorney profile carries the longer version. Mr. Head stays on with the firm in an advisory role, and co-authors the Georgia DUI Trial Practice Manual with them.
Super Lawyers named him a Rising Star and later listed him as a Super Lawyer. Martindale-Hubbell has rated him AV, the highest of its peer review ratings. For more than seventeen years he has also carried NHTSA instructor certification in the standardized field sobriety battery. That is the credential held by the people who train officers to give the tests. It matters in an Athens courtroom for a practical reason. He knows how the battery is taught, what an officer is trained to write down afterward, and where a report and the underlying paperwork part company.
Talk to an Athens-Clarke County Criminal Defense Lawyer
Cases charged in Athens-Clarke County are worked out of the Athens office rather than handled at a distance and appeared on twice. Where the charge is a serious traffic offense rather than a general criminal charge, our sister site georgiacriminaldefense.com carries a companion Athens page. It covers vehicular homicide, habitual violator status and repeat DUI.
Kohn & Yager, LLC — Athens Office
320 East Clayton Street, Suite 435
Athens, GA 30601
Two blocks from the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse
(404) 567-5515
We offer a free consultation, and it is confidential. Ask for Cory Yager.
Attorney advertising. The foregoing is general information about Georgia law, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.