Michael M. Barrett

Michael Barrett grew up in Charleston. He attended Porter-Gaud School. He started college at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. After his sophomore year he transferred back home to the warmer weather of SC and went to The Citadel. He finished The Citadel in 1997 with a B.A. in History. He shortly thereafter went into the Army as an 2nd Lieutenant in the Infantry. He spent six years on Active Duty between Fort Campbell and Fort Benning where he held various positions from Rifle Platoon Leader to Battalion Operations Officer. He left Active Duty to go to the South Carolina Army National Guard and to go to law school, both in 2003. In the fall of 2004 Michael matriculated with the first class at the Charleston School of Law. During law school Michaels National Guard unit was deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. He missed his anticipated graduation date, landing in Kandahar City in Afghanistan instead. A year later he returned to the US and finished law school, graduating in the winter of 2008. Shortly afterwards he went to work full time for South Carolina Army National Guard working on Emergency and Disaster Management Planning on the state and national level. In 2012 he deployed to Kosovo in support of peacekeeping operations. He is set to retire from the Army Reserves in May of 2021 after 23 years of service as an Infantry Officer.

Michael began practicing law in 2016, working as a solo practitioner. His areas of focus have been criminal defense, specifically DUIs. He has attended and passed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrations (NHTSA) DWI and Standardized Field Sobriety Test(SFST) Participant and Instructor courses, in addition to the Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement(ARIDE) course. He has also taken the Drug Recognition Enforcement (DRE) familiarization course based off the NHSTA DRE course only available for law enforcement, as it requires the students to make actual arrests. In layman’s terms, he has been through the exact same training law enforcement goes through to make a DUI arrest. He can also teach law enforcement and certify them to make DUI arrests through his training.

Michael has also taken the Datamaster DMT Familiarization and the Operators Course. The DMT is the only breath test machine used in the state of South Carolina.