Supreme Court says police don’t need a warrant to take the blood of alleged DWI drivers

MassPrivateI

Recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent does not help a drunken-driving suspect whose blood police tested without a warrant after a car crash, a New Jersey appeals court ruled.

In that 5-3 majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said bodily metabolization of alcohol does not represent an exigent circumstance that justifies drawing a suspected drunken driver’s blood without a warrant.   

“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,” she wrote. Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority in part.

Tuesday’s opinion still sides with the state, finding that the circumstances of the car accident Jones caused “presented an ‘objective exigency.’

“Viewing the circumstances here objectively, we are satisfied 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,'” Espinosa wrote.

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