According to the Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) a conviction for a DUI remains on your driving record permanently. For the purposes of sentencing and determining if you are a second time offender of driving under the influence GA law goes back for 5 years. In other words, if you receive 2 DUI's in the past 5 years, then the sentence will be greater, as required by law for a second offense.

Expungement is a term that means different things in different jurisdictions; generally, it refers to the cleansing of one's criminal record, or the sealing and destruction of arrest and/or conviction information.

Erasing your legal criminal record from the file of the Georgia Crime Information Center is termed “expungement of record” by the state of GA. One would seek expungement of record so that your criminal record for a DUI offense will not follow you for the remainder of your life.

We do not give legal advice and aren't completely familiar with the expungement laws in GA but we have heard that in Georgia it is possible to expunge certain arrest records if you have no other criminal charges pending against you and you have not been convicted of the same crime in the last five years. However from what we have read expungement is not available for DUI cases, first offender or conditional discharge pleas. In fact the deletion of a person’s arrest / criminal record is pretty rare in Georgia.

Also keep in mind that expungement of records in Georgia is referring to arrest or criminal records, not driving records which are kept by the GA DDS and not the courts that would expunge a criminal record. Once a DUI case is on your driving record, it generally stays on there for life as we mentioned earlier.

To see if a DUI can be expunged from your criminal record check with the Georgia courts and to see if there is any way to get DUI taken off of your driving record check with the GA DDS.