Winkle pleads guilty:

Mesa City Councilman Ryan Winkle pleads guilty to one count of extreme DUI and will serve six days in jail and 49 days of home detention. Winkle is to begin his jail time today at Lower Buckeye Jail.

Mesa City Councilman Ryan Winkle pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of extreme DUI and will serve six days in jail and 49 days of home detention.

Winkle will begin his jail time Friday at Lower Buckeye Jail, according to his attorney. After the weekend, he will have a 12-hour work release for the remaining days.

“I feel relieved, very relieved because we’ve been kind of in a holding pattern just waiting to see what’s going to happen and now finally we can kind of move on with things,” Winkle said in an interview with The Arizona Republic after he accepted the plea agreement.

Winkle was arrested in May after Tempe police officers saw him nearly hit three pedestrians about 1 a.m. May 7.

In body-camera footage of his arrest, Winkle told officers multiple times that he hadn’t been drinking. But he failed multiple sobriety tests.

His blood-alcohol level was later found to be 0.22 percent, a “super extreme” level, but his plea was for a lesser charge of “extreme” DUI.

Winkle’s plea technically includes 110 days of jail, but 55 days will be suspended as long as he completes all other elements of the plea deal, which includes substance-abuse screening and $3,800 in fines.

“Just to be clear, this is no special treatment,” Winkle’s attorney, John Phebus, said, noting his plea actually includes more jail time than is minimally required. “He has accepted responsibility, accepted a stiffer punishment than the law actually requires as a mandatory minimum.”

DUI attorney Russ Richelsoph agreed that Winkle’s plea agreement is much harsher than normal.

“He did not need to agree to that much jail time,” Richelsoph said.

Richelsoph said usually a DUI offender pleading guilty to extreme DUI would get nine days of jail, with five of