Exigent Circumstances Supported Warrantless Blood Alcohol Testing

State v. Stavish, Minn.Ct.App., 9/2/2014.  Law officers and various other first responders went to the site of a one car rollover crash.  There were beer cans in and about the truck that had rolled over.  There was a dead body.  There was Mr. Stavish, who needed medical attention, and who said that he had been driving, that he didn’t know how many people had been in the truck, and that he should not have been doing what he was doing.  Officers sent him off in an ambulance to the hospital, with a trooper in tow with instructions to get a blood draw from him at the hospital.  The trooper accomplished his task but did not get a warrant before doing so.

The state charged Mr. Stavish with vehicular homicide.  Nearly a year later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Missouri v. McNeely, 133 S. Ct. 1552 (2013).  Mr. Stavish moved to suppress the blood alcohol reading (.20), saying that it had been taken without a warrant in violation of McNeely.  The trial court granted that motion and the state appealed that ruling.

The court of appeals continues in its pursuit of imaginative “exigent circumstances” to justify warrantless blood alcohol testing.  The “virtual search warrant” from Bernard is under assault in the supreme court.  This time around, the court looks at what presumably were the “facts ono the ground” to conclude that there were exigent circumstances other than the metabolization of alcohol in the bloodstream to support a warrantless blood draw.  In fact, there were three:  The trooper was, first off, investigating a more serious crime than “an ordinary DWI charge” in play in McNeely.  Moreover, the medical treatment that Mr. Stavish was at the hospital to get might either affect or invalidate the blood alcohol test.  And, there was the possibility that Mr. Stavish would be medevac'd to another hospital before anybody could put a needle in him and draw blood within the two hour statutory limit.

The state continues to push the adoption of the good faith exception to the warrant requirement, something near and dear to Justice Stras.  See State v. Brooks, 838 N.W.2d 563 (Minn. 2013).  Having come up with a plausible list of “exigent circumstances” the court of appeals found no need to venture down that path.