Vince Neil to serve 15 days in jail under DUI plea deal

By Dave Toplikar

Published Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011 | 2:37 p.m.

Updated Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011 | 4:25 p.m.

A deal that Mötley Crüe rocker Vince Neil cut with the district attorney Tuesday for his DUI offense last summer might seem harsh — he must spend 15 days in jail. But it could have been worse.

Clark County District Attorney David Roger said Tuesday afternoon that Neil was looking at as much as six months of jail time if he had been convicted of the DUI charge he was facing at a bench trial scheduled for later this month in Las Vegas Justice Court.

Roger said he reached a plea agreement Tuesday morning with the 49-year-old rocker's attorney, Richard Schonfeld.

Under the agreement, Neil will plead guilty to misdemeanor DUI at 9 a.m. Jan. 26 before Justice of the Peace William Kephart.

Neil will serve a 30-day sentence — 15 days in the Clark County Detention Center in downtown Las Vegas and 15 consecutive days of house arrest, Roger said.

He will also be required to perform 48 hours of community service, pay a $400 fine, attend a DUI school and attend a "victim's impact panel," where he would listen to the relatives of DUI victims, Roger said.

A typical DUI conviction carries 48 hours of jail time, along with the fine, the DUI school and the victim impact panel, Roger said.

However, when Neil was pulled over by Metro police, he had been speeding. And he also had a prior drunken driving charge from 24 years ago, Roger said.

"I felt it was appropriate," Roger said of the plea agreement.

Neil, who lives in Las Vegas, was pulled over by a Metro Police officer about 11 p.m. June 27, 2010, for speeding and weaving between lanes on Desert Inn Road west of Paradise Road, near the Las Vegas Strip.

Neil told the officer that he had three glasses of champagne, but he didn't know when his last drink was.

The officer said Neil failed three standard drunken driving physical tests, which measure horizontal eye movement, the ability to walk and turn heel to toe, and the ability to stand on one leg for 30 seconds.

He also was given a breath test. Neil's readings from the test were 0.215 and 0.216, compared to the legal limit of 0.08, police said. Neil was booked into jail and was released the next day on $2,000 bail.

In 1984, he crashed a sports car head-on into another car in Redondo Beach, Calif., killing his passenger, Nicholas Dingley, a 24-year-old drummer with the group Hanoi Rocks.

Neil, then 25, wasn't injured. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to pay two victims in the other car $2.5 million in restitution. He was also sentenced to 30 days in jail, five years of probation and 200 hours of community service in that case.