Providence Drunk Driving Accident Attorneys

This page is for people who were hit by an impaired driver, not for people facing a charge. If you are looking for a defense lawyer, this is not the right page. If someone else’s drinking put you or a family member in an emergency room, keep reading. At Jeffrey Glassman Injury Lawyers, our Providence car accident attorneys pursue civil claims for people hurt in drunk driving crashes throughout Providence County. Based in part in our Rhode Island office in Woonsocket, we help injured clients pursue compensation for the harm caused by impaired drivers.

Most states’ impaired driving statistics look like most other states’. Rhode Island’s do not.

The Rhode Island Department of Transportation reports that alcohol-impaired fatalities were 43.7 percent of all traffic deaths in the state in 2022, against a national figure closer to thirty percent, placing Rhode Island among the states with the worst percentages in the country. Rhode Island arrests roughly three thousand drivers for impaired driving in a year. Nearly seventy percent of them refuse chemical testing. Of those who do get tested, the average result is around 0.17, more than twice the legal limit.

That last set of numbers matters to your case in a specific way, which we come back to below: in Rhode Island, a startling share of impaired drivers never produce a test result at all.

Effective July 1, 2025, Rhode Island extended the repeat-offender lookback period for driving under the influence from five years to ten. The change amended both the DUI statute and the chemical test refusal statute, replacing every five-year reference with a ten-year one. Violations before the effective date remain governed by the five-year window in place at the time.

This is the most consequential recent change in Rhode Island impaired driving law, and it matters civilly as well as criminally. A prior conviction now sits as a predicate for twice as long, which affects what the criminal case looks like and, in the right circumstances, what a jury can be told about a defendant’s history.

The underlying statute sets the adult limit at 0.08 percent and tiers the penalties by result: a first offense between 0.08 and 0.10, a first offense between 0.10 and 0.15, and a first offense at 0.15 or above or involving drugs, each carrying escalating fines, community service, potential jail, and license suspension. A second offense within the lookback carries mandatory jail. A third or subsequent offense within the lookback is a felony. Separate sections address driving under the influence resulting in death and resulting in serious bodily injury, and Rhode Island enhances penalties where a child under thirteen was in the vehicle.

Younger and commercial drivers face lower limits. Rhode Island sets a 0.02 threshold for drivers under eighteen and a separate driving-while-impaired provision at 0.02 for drivers aged eighteen to twenty. Commercial drivers are held to 0.04 under Rhode Island’s commercial driver’s license act, with a minimum one-year commercial disqualification for a first violation and three years if the driver was carrying placarded hazardous materials.

The two proceedings run on different tracks with different standards, and the civil claim does not wait for the criminal one to finish.

The state has to prove impairment beyond a reasonable doubt. You have to prove negligence by a preponderance of the evidence, which is a materially lower bar. A driver acquitted, or never charged, or charged and diverted, can still be liable to you. This matters more in Rhode Island than in most places precisely because of the refusal rate: when roughly seven in ten drivers refuse the chemical test, a large number of impaired driving cases proceed without the number that a prosecutor would most like to have.

Refusal has its own consequences under Rhode Island’s implied consent statute. And impairment gets proved civilly the way it always did before breath testing existed: through the officer’s observations, field sobriety performance, bodycam and cruiser video, receipts and tabs, surveillance from the last place the driver was served, witnesses, and the driving itself.

Rhode Island codified this, which many states did not, and the statute is more favorable than people expect.

The Rhode Island Liquor Liability Act creates liability for the negligent service of alcohol and, separately, for the reckless service of alcohol. Defendants are licensees, meaning bars, restaurants, clubs and package stores, along with their employees and agents, plus anyone who was required by law to hold a license and did not. Punitive damages are not available on the negligence track but are available where the service was reckless.

Two features are worth naming. First, the Act contains no damages cap of any kind; damages may be awarded for all injuries recognized under Rhode Island common or statutory law, and wrongful death damages are recoverable under it. Second, the Act is not an exclusive remedy: it expressly preserves common law negligence and recklessness claims, so a claim against a licensee does not have to be squeezed entirely into the statute. The limitations period under the Act is three years.

Building one of these claims means moving fast on things that vanish: point-of-sale records, server assignments, surveillance video, and the tab itself.

Rhode Island’s rule on private hosts is genuinely different depending on who was drinking, and getting it wrong in either direction misleads people.

An adult guest. Rhode Island has not recognized a duty owed by a social host to a third person injured by an intoxicated adult who drank at the host’s home. Our Supreme Court has said so directly and has deferred the question to the legislature.

An underage guest. Different answer. Rhode Island imposes a higher standard on an adult who knowingly provides alcohol to underage individuals, or who is aware that it is available to them, for consumption on their property. The Supreme Court found no valid justification for absolving a parent in that situation. Note the shape of the case in which it said so, though: the injured person was a guest at the party. Extending that duty to someone hurt on the road later is a further step, and an honest page should say so rather than promise it.

A friend who drove someone home. Rhode Island has declined to impose a duty on an adult who agrees to transport an intoxicated adult and then fails to prevent them from driving afterward, reasoning that such a duty would place an uncertain burden on friends and would discourage designated-driver arrangements.

Because Rhode Island is a fault state with no personal injury protection and no threshold, the claim exists from the first dollar: medical care past and future, lost earnings and diminished earning capacity, and pain and suffering.

Punitive damages deserve their own sentence, because impaired driving is one of the clearest settings for them. Rhode Island allows punitive damages where the conduct warrants, and in a death case Rhode Island’s wrongful death statute expressly permits punitive damages if they would have been recoverable had the person survived.

In a fatal case, Rhode Island is unusual in a way families should know about. The wrongful death statute sets a statutory minimum recovery of $350,000 where liability is found, raised from $250,000 effective January 1, 2024. That is a floor, not a ceiling, and it is not adjusted annually for inflation, whatever some Rhode Island pages say; the escalator that appeared in the introduced bill did not make it into the enacted law. Rhode Island also expressly compensates a surviving spouse, adult children, and parents for grief, emotional distress, and loss of society and companionship, and a separate claim exists for the person’s conscious pain and suffering before death.

If the drunk driver had no insurance, and in Rhode Island roughly one driver in six is uninsured, the claim moves to your own uninsured motorist coverage. Our Providence uninsured and underinsured motorist claims page explains how that works, including a rule about underinsured coverage that most Rhode Island websites state backward.