US Supreme Court Limits Warrantless Forced Blood Draw in DUI Investigations

April 17, 2013.  Missouri v. McNeely.  Mr. McNeely was stopped by a Missouri police officer for speeding and crossing the centerline. After declining to take a breath test to measure his blood alcohol concentration (BAC), he was arrested and taken to a nearby hospital for blood testing.  The officer never attempted to secure a search warrant. McNeely refused to consent to the blood test, but the officer directed a lab technician to take a sample. McNeely’s BAC tested well above the legal limit, and he was charged with driving while intoxicated (DWI). He moved to suppress the blood test result, arguing that taking his blood without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The trial court agreed, concluding that the exigency exception to the warrant requirement did not apply because, apart from the fact that McNeely’s blood alcohol was dissipating, no circumstances suggested that the officer faced an emergency. The State Supreme Court affirmed, relying on Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, in which the United States Supreme Court upheld a DWI suspect’s warrantless blood test where the officer “might reasonably have believed that he was confronted with an emergency, in which the delay necessary to obtain a warrant, under the circumstances, threatened ‘the destruction of evidence,'” id., at 770.  This case, the state court found, involved a routine DWI investigation where no factors other than the natural dissipation of blood alcohol suggested there was an emergency, and, thus, the nonconsensual warrantless test violated McNeely’s right to be free from unreasonable searches of his person.  Therefore, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the state court judgment.

The important impact of this decision is that in drunk driving investigations, the natural dissipation of the alcohol in a person’s bloodstream does NOT constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood draw without a warrant. 

Though a person’s blood alcohol level declines until the alcohol is eliminated, it does not follow that the court should depart from careful case-by-case assessment of exigency. When officers in drunk-driving investigations can reasonably obtain a warrant before having a blood sample drawn without significantly undermining the efficacy of the search, the Fourth Amendment mandates that they do so.

The court stated, “Because this case was argued on the broad proposition that drunk-driving cases present a per se exigency, the arguments and the record do not provide the Court with an adequate analytic framework for a detailed discussion of all the relevant factors that can be taken into account in determining the reasonableness of acting without a warrant.  It suffices to say that the metabolization of alcohol in the bloodstream and the ensuing loss of evidence are among the factors that must be considered in deciding whether a warrant is required.  no doubt, given the large number of arrests for this offense in different jurisdictions nationwide, cases will arise when anticipated delays in obtaining a warrant will justify a blood test without judicial authorization, for in every case the law must be concerned with evidence being destroyed.  But that inquiry ought not to be pursued here where the queston is not properly before this Court.” 

 

 

2013-04-17T20:19:16+00:00