“Never been to New Mexico, never driven through New Mexico,” Justin Jones says. “I’ve never even stepped foot in the state off a plane,” he exclaimed. But there it was. A formal letter from Santa Fe, stating his license was now suspended. After all, they said, he’d never properly handled a DUI from all the way back on Christmas Eve, 2005.

The envelope arrived in early October to Carroll County, Georgia, addressed to Jones, an administrator. He opened his mail and got quite the surprise, considering he’d never driven on any road in that state, let alone been pulled over by police.

A 20-year-old DUI he insists he never got

December 24, 2005 was the day after his 21st birthday. He was nowhere near New Mexico. He’d come back home from college to celebrate the milestone.

Still, the sudden suspension put him out of legal driving for more than two months. He paid for Ubers as a temporary workaround.

How something like this could even happen

State DMVs regularly query the National Driver Register, a federal database that tracks serious violations such as DUIs and suspensions. The NDR matches records by name, date of birth, and sometimes partial Social Security numbers.

If there’s a false positive, one state can mistakenly report another state’s offense as valid for someone else.

In Jones’s case, the Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) eventually explained the DUI record was sent electronically from the New Mexico Motor Vehicle Division and added to his Georgia record.

Georgia’s DDS told WSB-TV they’ve now asked New Mexico to submit a “negate” to correct the error, after which the DUI should be removed from Georgia’s database.

The DUI belonged to someone else, but Jones had to do a bunch of the legwork for the record keepers

Jones brought sealed court documents from New Mexico showing he has no conviction there, plus a letter from the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department stating the DUI record belonged to someone else with a similar name and birth date.

Even then, DDS initially refused to reinstate his license until New Mexico’s electronic correction arrives.

“Me and my wife celebrated before I left the house. When I got back, I was kind of defeated because I was still suspended,” he explained.

Record issues like this aren’t common, but they’re not unheard of either

Last month, we covered a California teacher who lost $24,000 in wages over someone else’s DUI. Her last name is “Smith,” obviously a common one here in the states. Oddly, though, the original date of that so-called DUI happened before she was married to Mr. Smith.

The core problem usually comes down to mis-linked records between state DMVs and the federal NDR system. In many cases, drivers must obtain formal letters or corrected electronic entries from the originating state to clear the error.

According to SafeHome.org, nearly 805,000 DUI arrests were made nationwide in 2024, showing how frequently these offenses are recorded across jurisdictions. Even though only a small share ends in conviction, states exchange data broadly to enforce suspensions consistently.

That’s intended to keep unsafe drivers off roads in every state. But when the data’s wrong, it can strand harmless drivers in bureaucratic limbo.

As of this writing, Jones is still waiting to get the wrongful DUI entry corrected. Georgia DDS says it can’t (or won’t) do anything without a formal entry from New Mexico.