If a police officer or state trooper does deem you as a refusal, then he would send the paperwork up to Penn DOT, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, for a one year license suspension to occur and the defendant then will get a notice from Penn DOT stating that they must hand in their driver’s license which will be suspended for an additional one year on this date. The letter would also say that they have 30 days to appeal that license suspension. That is when they must contact a lawyer, and basically what I do is they immediately file an appeal that the refusal was not proper, that they did not actually refuse to take the test, and then a hearing will be given.
When the appeal is filed, the defendant will not have to hand in their license on that date and there will be a hearing set forth a couple of months down the road and a hearing judge, usually court common police judge, will hear the case with the Penn DOT attorney. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation will have an attorney there. He will have also the police officer there and the person who gave the test, or tried to give the test, to my client and there will be an actual hearing. Then the judge will decide if a refusal did occur or not.