(The Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)
Today's your lucky day, Tyler McNeely.
Do you remember the night of Saturday, October 2, 2010, Tyler? Probably not, because by 2:08 AM, you were pulled over by the Missouri state police for speeding and veering across the center line. Officer thought you were drunk—bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, you smelled like alcohol—oh, and you told the officer you had "a couple of beers."
Field sobriety tests didn't go so well either, but at least you were smart enough to decline to provide a breathalyzer sample ... at which point the officer decided to drive you to the nearest hospital for a blood draw instead. He didn't get a warrant, and you didn't consent, even though that meant an immediate one-year revocation of your driver’s license. Guess what? The officer told the lab tech to draw your blood anyway, and at approximately 2:35 AM, your BAC was measured at 0.154 percent, well above the legal limit of 0.08. Your lawyer was sober enough to move to suppress the blood evidence at trial. He won then. The state appealed.
And today, Tyler, you're a winner. In an 8-1 decision, the Supreme Court rejected arguments offered by the state of Missouri (and the Obama administration) which sought to dispense with the warrant requirement before shoving a needle into your arm, no matter how much your BAC might dissipate over time, because that alone was no reason to dispense with the Fourth Amendment when it comes to DUI blood testing. The evidence cannot be used against him.
Justice Sotomayor wrote the principal opinion, for herself and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg and Kagan:
It is true that as a result of the human body’s natural metabolic processes, the alcohol level in a person’s blood begins to dissipate once the alcohol is fully absorbed and continues to decline until the alcohol is eliminated. ... But it does not follow that we should depart from careful case-by-case assessment of exigency and adopt the categorical rule proposed by the State and its amici. In those drunk-driving investigations where police officers can reasonably obtain a warrant before a blood sample can be drawn without significantly undermining the efficacy of the search, the Fourth Amendment mandates that they do so. We do not doubt that some circumstances will make obtaining a warrant impractical such that the dissipation of alcohol from the bloodstream will support an exigency justifying a properly conducted warrantless blood test. That, however, is a reason to decide each case on its facts, not to accept the “considerable overgeneralization” that a per se rule would reflect.
The context of blood testing is different in critical respects from other destruction-of-evidence cases in which the police are truly confronted with a “ ‘now or never’ ” situation. In contrast to, for example, circumstances in which the suspect has control over easily disposable evidence, BAC evidence from a drunk-driving suspect naturally dissipates over time in a gradual and relatively predictable manner. Moreover, because a police officer must typically transport a drunk-driving suspect to a medical facility and obtain the assistance of someone with appropriate medical training before conducting a blood test, some delay between the time of the arrest or accident and the time of the test is inevitable regardless of whether police officers are required to obtain a warrant.
Simple enough, really. Keep reading unless you can already guess who the one dissenter is, or can already guess the surprise ending for McNeely.
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