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Four days ago I posted about a case, Missouri v. McNeely, that was to be argued to the United States Supreme Court.  See The Slow Death of the 4th Amendment in DUI Cases.  The case involved the forceful use of hypodermic needles on drunk driving suspects.  Following are comments from the Washington Post on the arguments yesterday and the justice's questions which may provide a window into this important issue:

Supreme Court Seems Unlikely to Let Police Order Blood Tests for  Drunk Driving Suspects

Washington, DC – Jan. 9 — The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed unlikely to allow police to routinely force suspected drunk drivers to give a blood sample without the officers at least trying to obtain a warrant from a judge.

There seemed to be little, if any, support for the proposition that the usual constitutional protections that require a warrant for searches do not apply in drunk-driving arrests. Missouri, backed by the Obama administration, argued that a suspect’s dissipating blood-alcohol content meant that, in effect, evidence was being lost and thus drawing blood should not require consent or a judge’s order.

That argument drew fire almost immediately.

“How can it be reasonable to forgo the Fourth Amendment in a procedure as intrusive as a needle going into someone’s body?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked. The justice, interestingly, is a diabetic who has given herself daily shots of insulin since childhood.

Justice Antonin Scalia immediately signaled that he considers a blood test different from other procedures the government may require.

“Why don’t you force him to take the breathalyzer test, instead of forcing him to have a needle shoved . . . in his arm?” Scalia asked John N. Koester Jr., the Missouri prosecutor presenting the case for his state. Koester replied that a breathalyzer requires the suspect’s participation.

For most of the hour-long argument, the justices seemed to be debating among themselves what emergency circumstances — an inability to contact a magistrate late at night, for instance — might allow taking blood from an uncooperative suspect…

Courts nationwide are divided about whether a 1966 Supreme Court ruling created an emergency exception to the warrant requirement for taking blood or whether ”special facts” must be present to make a warrant unnecessary.

Koester and Assistant Solicitor General Nicole A. Saharsky argued that the rapid dissipation of alcohol was enough to relieve law enforcement from the warrant requirement.

“The police are facing a destruction of critical blood-alcohol evidence,” Saharsky told the court. “Every minute counts, and it’s reasonable for the officers to proceed.”

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that it is relatively easy and quick for police to get a warrant — a phone call is often enough — and that police could attempt to secure one in the time it takes to drive a suspect to a hospital for the procedure. If 30 minutes passes without an answer, perhaps the officer could proceed, she suggested.

Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, represented McNeely and told the court that Missouri, the states supporting it and the U.S. government are asking for too much.

“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.

He has noted that states may revoke a driver’s license for a suspect who refuses to take a test, so there is an incentive to agree. Shapiro said half of the states — Maryland and Virginia as well as the District of Columbia are not among them — prohibit blood draws without warrants…

For a clearer picture of what we're talking about, see my posts Forced Blood Draws by Cops in Back Seat, Suspect Resisting Forced Blood Draw is Tasered, Dies and Catheter Forced Up Penis After DUI Arrest.
 

DUI BLOG

Maybe MADD's "War on Drunk Driving" has gone a bit too far….

D.A. Reviewing Death of West Allis Man After Taser Incident

Milwaukee, WI.  Dec. 6 — Prosecutors are investigating how West Allis police officers handled a drunken-driving suspect found dead the day after they used force and a Taser on him to obtain a blood draw…

The Milwaukee County medical examiner's office is awaiting autopsy results before determining a cause of death.  According to court and medical examiner's records:

Robert Wayne Maurina, 46, had come to the West Allis Police Department early on Nov. 28 to pick up his girlfriend after she was arrested on a drunken driving charge. Police suspected Maurina also was intoxicated and arrested him about 4 a.m. He was later charged with fifth-offense drunken driving.

At Aurora West Allis Medical Center, Maurina resisted attempts to take a blood sample, according to court records, and had to be restrained and stunned with a Taser.

Shortly before noon the same day, Maurina was released to his brother, in whose basement Maurina lived. The brother told a medical examiner's office investigator that Maurina had complained about pain to his ribs and kidney on his left side, and that he heard Maurina coughing about 7 p.m. that day.

The next morning, the brother said, he found Maurina dead in his basement room. The medical examiner's report indicated that Maurina was on several medications.

The funeral for Maurina, an Air Force veteran, was Tuesday…

No comment necessary.

(Thanks to John Kruzelock.)
 

DUI BLOG

I’ve written in the past about the increasingly common practice of cops to pin DUI suspects down and forcefully withdraw blood from them.  In some cases the needle is wielded by medical staff — and in others by the cops themselves.  See Taking Blood by Force, Forced Blood Draws by Cops in Back Seat, Forced Blood Draws by Cops Spreading and Forced Blood Draws by Cops: Constitutional?  

How far will the courts permit these kinds of police state tactics?  One state supreme court has just drawn the line:

 

Illinois Court Blocks Forced Draw From Motorist


Chicago, IL.  April 16 – An increasing number of states allow police to use any level of force needed to take blood from a motorist accused of driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI). In Ohio and Texas this procedure is explicitly authorized by statute. In Washington, the state Supreme Court decided to sanction the practice on its own authority. Last Tuesday, the Illinois Court of Appeals was unwilling to take that extreme step.

A three-judge panel upheld a trial court’s determination to suppress the evidence created when police held Jacqueline Farris down and forcibly drew her blood. On May 12, 2009 at around 10:30pm, Officer Kevin Orms arrived at the scene of an accident in the village of Bradley and found Farris behind the wheel of one of the vehicles involved. She smelled of alcohol. Orms had her taken to the hospital where he asked for consent to draw her blood. Farris refused. Officer Orms then ordered a nurse to take the blood by force. Three personnel were required to hold Farris down because she resisted.

Lab results showed the blood alcohol content (BAC) of the Farris sample was estimated at 0.285, but a lower court threw out the evidence as inadmissible. Under state law, forcible blood extraction is only authorized when a driver causes death or the personal injury of another driver, passenger or pedestrian.

Prosecutors argued that the officer had probable cause to suspect Farris of being drunk, and there was not time to obtain a warrant before the alcohol would dissipate. In agreeing with the lower court, the appellate majority cited a 2005 state Supreme Court precedent that allowed testing without consent in cases of death or injury but did not touch on cases where no injuries occurred.

"In Jones our supreme court was quite clear that there is no practical need for physical force in obtaining bodily fluid samples since the Vehicle Code eliminates any advantage a DUI arrestee might hope to gain from refusing chemical testing," Judge William E. Holdridge wrote for the majority. "As the Jones court noted, the defendant’s refusal to comply with the request for a sample, in and of itself, is sufficient to justify a statutory summary suspension of the defendant’s driver’s license, the purpose of which is to protect the public from intoxicated motorists."  People v. Farris.

This court prohibited forced blood draws in a medical setting.  Other courts, however, have actually approved the forceful extraction of blood by the cop himself — even when done in the back seat of a patrol car.  See, for example, Would You Want a Cop Taking Blood From You?
 

DUI BLOG

Blood stains found on Mark Stobbe’s garage floor are
consistent with Bev Rowbatham moving or being
moved while bleeding, jurors were told Monday.
Manitoba stories

An article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal caught our eye – Testing the Limits of Tipsy.

As the article discusses, alcohol affects individuals differently. A person’s blood alcohol level may be affected by their age, weight, gender, physical condition, amount of food consumed, and any drugs or medications they are currently taking. In addition, different drinks may contain different amounts of alcohol, so it is important to know yourself, what you are consuming, and pay attention to the rate you are drinking.

Factors that can affect Blood Alcohol Concentration include:

• Amount consumed
• Concentration of alcohol
• Pace of drinking – the faster you drink, the higher your BAC
• Food in stomach (Food in the stomach slows the absorption of alcohol)
• Body weight (more body weight, lower BAC)
• Gender – BAC rises faster for females than it does for males
• % of body fat (more body fat, lower BAC)
• Gastric alcohol dehydrogenase (enzymes in the stomach that break down alcohol)
• Carbonation – Carbonation irritates stomach lining, increasing the rate of absorption
• Health status of liver – healthy livers can break down alcohol quicker

With this many factors, the best course of action is always to take it safe. Put simply, if you plan to drink, don’t plan to drive.

Century Council Blog

Let me tell you about one of my law firm’s cases that ended up in a Los Angeles Times article entitled "DUI Case Botched by Blood Mixup".

One of our attorneys, Lane Scherer, had a young client who had been arrested for drunk driving by the Los Angeles Police Department and had a blood sample drawn from his arm. He swore to us that he was innocent, and we believed him. Problem: the blood alcohol content of the sample was .15% — almost twice the drunk driving limit.

Now what?

We obtained a portion of the sample from the LAPD crime lab and sent it to a private lab that we use for reanalyzing the blood samples of all our DUI clients. The lab reported the blood alcohol level to be .13% — lower, but a long way from being under .08%. As we requested, the lab also tested for preservative and anticoagulent (either fermentation or coagulation can raise the alcohol level in the sample), but everything appeared in order.

Our client still insisted he was not driving under the influence of alcohol. The only other possibility was a faulty chain of custody. In other words, the LAPD lab (the same one that botched the O.J. Simpson case) got the vial of our client’s blood mixed up and tested someone else’s blood.

So we had the sample blood-typed to see if it was that of another arrestee. Result: type O — the same as our client’s. But, then, that’s the most common type of blood.

We decided to try something different, something that, to our knowledge, had not been done before in any DUI case. We had blood taken from our client and, along with a portion of the remaining sample from the LAPD lab, shipped to a laboratory in Oklahoma that specialized in DNA testing.

A month or so later the report came back: the blood tested by LAPD was conclusively not that of our client.

The prosecutor in the case initially refused to accept these results. But after we proved that the comparison blood had come from our client and after LAPD checked the blood themselves, he reluctantly dismissed all criminal charges.

Predictably, in the L.A. Times article LAPD tried to point the finger at someone else:

Police officials said they are investigating how the mix-up occurred and who is responsible, But, they said, they are fairly confident that the lab did not make a mistake.

One possible explanation, they said, was that the blood was mistakenly labeled when it was initially drawn by nurses at LAPD’s jail intake facility in Van Nuys.

As always, the police claim infallibility: "We do not make mistakes.  It was the nurses".

So how could this have happened? The truth is that it probably happens far more commonly than you might think.

When a blood sample is drawn from the suspect in a DUI case rather than using a breath machine, the sample is supposed to be inserted into a vial containing preservative and anticoagulent, then shaken and sealed. Procedures require that a chain of custody be established: the location of the vial of blood must be identifiable at all times so that it does not become contaminated or mixed up with someone else’s vial. This is done by labelling the seal with identifying information, then usually placing the sealed vial in an evidence locker (which should be refrigerated but often is not) until it is transported to the crime laboratory for further storage and refrigeration. At any stage of this chain of custody, of course, things can go wrong with the vial or the records.

It may be a week or so before the vial is finally analyzed. This is commonly done using gas chromatograph instruments, and the vial is one of many analyzed in large batches. A batch is a group of vials, perhaps 40 or more which are analyzed in sequence; this is much faster and more economical than isolating, identifying and separately analyzing one vial after another.

Of course, it is critically important that the sequence of vials tested by the gas chromatograph coincide with the sequence of vials in the records. If the sequence of numbering of the vials is off by one, then the records will show a result from the analysis of another vial. And it won’t be just one person whose blood is falsely reported: every other vial may also be one off — and will all be wrong. And you have 40 people people facing criminal charges based upon false evidence.

"How do I know the blood they tested was mine?"  Simple — if you can get a portion of the sample from the crime lab and have an extra 00 for DNA testing laying around.

Otherwise, I guess you’ll never know…
 

DUI BLOG

When the police administer a breathalyzer, the suspect’s breath sample is analyzed — and then destroyed by purging it into the air. Although it is easy and inexpensive to save the sample so that it could later be independently analyzed by the defense, the U.S. Supreme Court in California v. Trombetta ruled that there is no right to this. (See "Why Do Police Destroy the Evidence in DUI Cases?".)

Recognizing that an accused should have some minimal rights even in a DUI case, many states have enacted laws requiring the police to advise the suspect that he has the right to have an independent blood sample drawn so that it may be later analyzed and compared to the breath test results. California’s Vehicle Code Section 23614 is an example:

(a) ….a person who chooses to submit to a breath test shall be advised before or after the test that the breath testing equipment does not retain any sample of the breath and that no breath sample will be available after the test which could be analyzed later…

(b) The person shall also be advised that, because no breath sample is retained, the person will be given an opportunity to provide a blood or urine sample that will be retained at no cost to the person so that there will be something retained that may be subsequently analyzed for the alcohol content of the person’s blood. If the person completes a breath test and wishes to provide a blood or urine sample to be retained, the sample shall be collected and retained in the same manner as if the person had chosen a blood or urine test initially. [italics added]

Sounds fair. Except officers don’t like handling a suspect’s urine or spending an hour or so finding a blood technician to draw a sample. Result: this law is commonly ignored by the police. (Some DUI report forms contain a place for the officer to indicate that he advised the suspect of the right to an independent test, and it is commonly checked off — and ignored.)

So what can a defendant do if this legal right is violated? Well, the statute clearly says "shall" advise and collect: it is mandatory, not optional. It would seem to follow that there would be some legal sanction for a willful refusal to follow this law — the only meaningful one being suppression of the breath test.

Wrong. Remember: this is a DUI case we’re dealing with. If you look closely, another little provision at the end of California’s statute adds the following:

(d) No failure or omission to advise pursuant to this section shall affect the admissibility of any evidence of the alcohol content of the blood of the person arrested.

Cute, no? The law gives you a "right", and then makes it unenforceable. It is, as we lawyers say, "a right without a remedy". And, of course, since there are no consequences for ignoring this advisement of the right to an independent test, most officers continue to ignore the law. Practically speaking, then, officers do not have to follow the law and advise the suspect of his right to an independent test.

There are some court decisions, however, which seem to say that interfering with attempts by the arrested person to have blood drawn may be grounds for suppression of the breath test. See, e.g., In re Martin, 58 Cal.2d 509. And many states will suppress breath test results if the police refuse to permit the suspect to obtain a blood sample. In State v. George, 754 P.2d 460, for example, the Kansas court ruled that breath results should have been suppressed where the arresting officer refused a suspect’s request for an independent test because of the time required to transport him to a hospital and find a physician.

Bottom line:  yes, you have an absolute legal right to a blood sample…except, well, you don’t. 
  

DUI BLOG

Let me tell you about one of my law firm’s DUI cases that ended up in a Los Angeles Times article entitled “DUI Case Botched by Blood Mixup”.

One of the attorneys in the firm had a young client who had been arrested for drunk driving by the Los Angeles Police Department and had a blood sample drawn from his arm. He swore to us that he was innocent, and we believed him. Problem: the blood alcohol content of the sample was .15% — almost twice the drunk driving limit.

Now what?

We obtained a portion of the sample from the LAPD crime lab and sent it to a private lab that we use for reanalyzing the blood samples of all our DUI clients. The lab reported the blood alcohol level to be .13% — lower than the police analyss, but still a long way from being under .08%. As we requested, they also tested for preservative and anticoagulent (either fermentation or coagulation can raise the alcohol level in the sample), but everything appeared to be in order.

Our client still insisted he was not driving under the influence of alcohol. The only other reasonable possibility was a faulty chain of custody. In other words, the LAPD lab got the vial  of our client’s blood mixed up and tested someone else’s blood. Kind of like the work they did in the O.J. Simpson case.

So we had the sample blood-typed to see if it was that of another arrestee. Result: type “O”– the same as our client’s. But, then, that’s the most common type of blood.

We decided to try something different, something that, to our knowledge, had not been done before in a DUI case. We had blood taken from our client and, with a portion of the remaining sample from the LAPD lab, shipped to an independent laboratory in Oklahoma that specialized in DNA testing.

A month or so later the report came back: the blood tested by LAPD was conclusively not that of our client.

The prosecutor in the case initially refused to accept these results. But after we proved that the comparison blood had come from our client and after LAPD checked the blood themselves, he reluctantly dismissed all criminal charges.  Predictably, in the L.A. Times article LAPD tried to point the finger at someone else:

Police officials said they are investigating how the mix-up occurred and who is responsible,  But, they said, they are fairly confident that the lab did not make a mistake.  One possible explanation, they said, was that the blood was mistakenly labeled when it was initially drawn by nurses at LAPD’s jail intake facility in Van Nuys. 

Typically, the police claimed infallibility: “We do not make mistakes…It was the nurses”. 

So how could this have happened? The truth is that it probably happens far more commonly than we suppose.

When a blood sample is drawn from the suspect in a DUI case rather than using a breath machine, the sample is supposed to be inserted into a vial containing preservative and anticoagulent, then shaken and sealed. Procedures require that a chain of custody be established: the location of the vial of blood must be identifiable at all times so that it does not become contaminated or mixed up with someone else’s vial. This is done by labelling the seal with identifying information, then usually placing the sealed vial in an evidence locker (which should be refrigerated but often is not) until it is transported to the crime laboratory for further storage and refrigeration. At any stage of this chain of custody, of course, things can go wrong with the vial or the records.

It may be a week or so before the vial is finally analyzed. This is commonly done using gas chromatograph instruments, and the vial is one of many analyzed in large “batches”. A batch is a group of vials, perhaps 40 or more, which are analyzed in sequence; this is much faster and more economical than isolating, identifying and separately analyzing one vial after another. Of course, it is critically important that the sequence of tests by the gas chromatograph coincide with the sequence of vials in the records. If the sequence of numbering of the vials is off by one, then the records will show a result from the analysis of another vial. And it won’t be just one person whose blood is falsely reported: every other vial will also be one off — and will all be wrong.  And you have 40 people people facing criminal charges based upon false evidence.

“How do I know the blood they tested was mine?” Simple – if you can get a portion of the sample from the crime lab and have an extra 00 for DNA testing laying around. 

Otherwise, I guess you’ll never know….
 

DUI BLOG