Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil gets 15 days for DUI, speeding

By Dave Toplikar

Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2011 | 9:36 a.m.

Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil was in and out of a Las Vegas courtroom early Wednesday to be sentenced to 15 days of jail time for a DUI and speeding offense from last summer.

Neil, 49, slipped under the radar of the news media by getting an early courtroom appearance about 7:45 a.m., more than an hour before he was scheduled to appear to make a plea deal in Las Vegas Justice Court.

Mary Ann Price, court information officer, said Neil was in the building early, so his case was moved up before Justice of the Peace Pro Tem Gerry Zobrist at the requests of his attorneys, David Chesnoff and Richard Schonfeld. Neil had been scheduled to go before Justice of the Peace Eric Goodman at 9 a.m.

"He came early, so they took it early," Price told reporters outside of the courtroom just before 9 a.m.. "He was in and out really quick."

Zobrist accepted the plea agreement and Neil was sentenced to 15 days in the Clark County Detention Center beginning Feb. 15.

Neil will then serve 15 days of house arrest, pay a $585 fine and attend DUI school and attend a victim impact panel online, Price said.

Neil had been scheduled to have a bench trial today, but his attorneys had worked out a plea agreement with District Attorney David Roger last week. Had Neil gone to trial and had been found guilty, he was looking at as much as six months of jail time if he had been convicted of the DUI charge, Roger said.

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, Neil 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.