US Supreme Court hears warrantless blood sample case

Listen to this article

The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared unwilling Wednesday to allow police to take blood samples from suspected drunk drivers without a warrant.

“How can it be reasonable to forego the Fourth Amendment in a procedure as intrusive as a needle going into someone’s body?” asked Justice Sonia Sotomayor at one point during oral arguments in Missouri v. McNeely.

The case involves Tyler McNeely, who was stopped by police for speeding and given a field sobriety test that he failed. When McNeely refused to submit to an alcohol breath analysis, police arrested him for driving while intoxicated and transported him to the hospital to obtain a blood sample. Despite McNeely’s refusal to consent, the sample was taken at the direction of police. The results revealed that McNeely’s blood-alcohol content was far above the legal limit.

McNeely moved to suppress the test because the sample was obtained without a warrant. The state argued that the results were admissible under the “exigent circumstances” exception to the warrant requirement, because McNeely’s blood-alcohol content would be impossible to ascertain after the time necessary to secure a warrant had passed.

But the trial court disagreed and granted the motion, and the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the “mere dissipation of blood-alcohol evidence” was insufficient to bring the case within the exception to the warrant requirement.

The Supreme Court granted the state’s petition for certiorari.

Needle in the arm

As soon as John Koester Jr., assistant prosecuting attorney for Cape Girardeau County, Mo., began making his argument that drunk driving investigations require “quickly securing blood alcohol evidence with as little delay as possible,” Sotomayor began peppering him with questions.

“How come it took so long for this state to figure out that it needed to do this without a warrant?” Sotomayor asked. “The officer testified that he’s made drunk driving arrests for years. … What [made] it impractical to get a warrant” in this case?

“There’s no question that he would have been able to secure a warrant,” Koester replied. “The issue was it was going to take a considerable amount of time.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg followed up on Sotomayor’s line of questioning.

“There’s nothing that distinguished this case from other cases on the facts,” she said.

“There was a delay – that’s the difference,” Koester said. “Quickly securing blood alcohol evidence is important because the evidence is being lost at a significant rate with every minute that passes.”

Sotomayor noted that most police rely on breath tests, not blood tests.

“[A] ruling [in] your favor is going to change that and put [the] Court’s print, on: ‘Use the most intrusive way you can to prove your case,’” Sotomayor said.

Koester disagreed. “I think the end result will be more people will agree to take the breathalyzer test.”

“Why don’t you force him to take the breathalyzer test instead of forcing him to have a needle shoved in his arm?” asked Justice Antonin G. Scalia.

“For practical reasons it’s very difficult to force a drunk driver to take a breath test,” Koester replied.

After some justices suggested that obtaining a warrant may not take very long, Nicole Saharsky, assistant to the solicitor general arguing in support of Missouri, sought to clarify that point.

“We are just not in a place where the time to get the warrant everywhere is 15 minutes or less,” Saharsky said.

But if the Court removes the warrant requirement on such evidence, “the game’s up, right?” asked Scalia, suggesting that such a ruling would be impossible to reverse in the future.

“I think that if the world changed so that every police officer had an iPad and that judges were always on duty and that the warrants could be gotten that quickly,” then the ruling could be revisited, Saharsky replied.

‘Sound and fury signifying nothing?’

Steven Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, argued on McNeely’s behalf and sought to build on the justices’ skepticism of the state’s case.

“The issue in this case is whether the state may stick a needle in the arm of everyone arrested on suspicion of drunk driving without a warrant and without consent,” Shapiro said.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer tried to carve out the contours more.

“I thought the question [was limited] to when the person won’t agree to a breathalyzer,” Breyer said.

“What Missouri and the United States are urging is a categorical exemption to the warrant requirement in all DWI cases nationwide,” Shapiro replied.

“Is this a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing?” asked Scalia. “I mean, what advantage do you think your client would get from the warrant requirement other than [allowing] his blood alcohol to reduce itself? … Are these warrants ever turned down?”

“I do not know the answer to that,” Shapiro said.

“I bet you they’re not,” Scalia responded.

“This Court’s entire Fourth Amendment jurisprudence rests on the proposition that the privacy safeguards of the Fourth Amendment benefit by having a neutral and detached magistrate review the evidence before the state does something as intrusive as putting a needle in somebody’s arm,” Shapiro said.

Ginsburg noted that fingernail scrapings can be obtained by police without a warrant. “That’s as intrusive as a blood test,” she said.

Shapiro replied that the rationale was different – in the case of fingernail scrapings, the suspect could scrub his hands clean before a warrant is obtained.

“It is a very different situation when you have the defendant himself destroying evidence.”

A decision is expected later this term.