John Michael Giglio

If I could give zero stars, I would. We were out of state visitors in 2009 to the area when my husband was charged with DUI and child endangerment. We had been in an argument while parked at a gas station. Our daughter was asleep in the backseat. Police officers who happened to be nearby came to ...make sure everything was OK and they wanted my husband to take a breathalyzer test which he refused. He was arrested and charged and I bailed him out the next morning. We went back to our home state and I consulted with several attorneys over the phone before choosing Mike Giglio. He seemed very professional and knowledgeable. When the court date approached we flew to the area and showed up at the courthouse only to see a sign on the door that the courthouse was closed and all cases for the day had been postponed until further notice due to weather. Mr. Giglio failed to let us know anything at all, and when I finally did reach him, he was very nonchalant about the whole thing and did not care that we had flown all the way from Washington for nothing. The appearance was rescheduled for a couple of months later, and we flew back once again. The judge reviewed footage from body cams and gas station cameras, he heard my testimony, and he heard my husband’s testimony. The judge acknowledged that my husband had not been pulled over for DUI and that we were parked in a parking lot and that the officers had not witnessed my husband driving, and he also acknowledged that there was no chemical proof of intoxication since my husband refused the test. He decided to dismiss the DUI charge because my husband did pass the physical field sobriety tests given and because there was no chemical proof of intoxication, but he said that he was going to keep the charge of child endangerment because we had been arguing in the car in her presence even though she never woke up at all during the argument. We had no idea that in Georgia a child endangerment charge is an automatic DUI charge, so when a person is charged with DUI and child endangerment, in reality there are TWO charges for DUI because the child endangerment charge has an automatic DUI charge with it. So the original DUI was dropped by the judge but the child endangerment charge stuck. Mr. Giglio told us that we were good to go, and we were very thankful to him for his work. He never told us that we were not free and clear of any DUI charges. My husband still had physical possession of his license, but two and a half years later when he went to renew his license, he found out that his license had been suspended for all that time because of a child endangerment DUI charge. I called Mr. Giglio to find out why everything wasn’t cleared, and when he finally answered my call after multiple attempts, he nonchalantly told me about the child endangerment conviction having an automatic DUI attached to it. It didn’t make any sense to me that the judge threw out the original DUI and kept the child endangerment charge simply because we were arguing. Since he didn’t see enough evidence of intoxication to convict my husband of the original DUI, then why did he keep the child endangerment charge knowing that it had a DUI attached to it? Mr. Giglio should have advised us of this fact and should have appealed it or pushed to have the child endangerment downgraded to reckless driving. At the very least he should have told us because my husband was driving around on a suspended license for two and a half years. This guy was so flippant and blasé about the whole thing, and he had the audacity to try to make me feel stupid for not knowing this stuff, when that is what we hired him to do!