No Retroactivity For Birchfield/Thompson DWI Warrant Requirements

Brooks v. State, Minn.Ct.App., 5/15/2017.  Mr. Brooks has been litigating his three DWI convictions for nearly a decade.  The focus of this litigation has been his claim that the police needed a search warrant in order to collect either blood or urine samples.  Read about some of that here.  This litigation has led him to both Minnesota appellate courts multiple times, and to the U.S. Supreme Court at least once.  Although he has won some skirmishes along the way, his convictions remain on the books.

While all this running around has been going on, SCOTUS decided Missouri v. McNeeley, 133 S.Ct. 1552 (2013) (In drunk-driving investigations, the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood test without a warrant.; and Birchfield v. North Dakota, 136 S.Ct., 2160 (2016) (The Fourth Amendment permits warrantless breath tests incident to arrests for drunk driving but not warrantless blood tests.). The Minnesota Supreme Court then decided State v. Thompson, 886 N.W.2d 224 (Minn). 2016), which begrudgingly accepted Birchfield.  

Mr. Brooks then fired what surely must be his last bullet, this post conviction petition.  He said that Birchfield and Thompson should be applied retroactively to his convictions.  Mr. Brooks said that these decisions did not announce "new rules of law" and thus under Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288 (1989) must be applied retroactively. Well, who knows:

It is admittedly often difficult to determine when a case announces a new rule, and we do not attempt to define the spectrum of what may or may not constitute a new rule for retroactivity purposes. In general, however, a case announces a new rule when it breaks new ground or imposes a new obligation on the States or the Federal Government. To put it differently, a case announces a new rule if the result was not dictated by precedent existing at the time the defendant’s conviction became final. 

The court of appeals takes the risk-free pass and says that the aforementioned cases did, indeed, announce "new rules of law" and thus do not get retroactive application.  After all, the court of appeal shad already said that McNeely did not apply retroactively. O'Connell v. State, 858 N.W.2d 161 (Minn.Ct.App., 2015), review granted (Minn. 3/25/2015) and order granting review vacated, (Minn. 10/20/2015).  Mr. Brooks did not argue that either of the two Teague exceptions applied and so that was that.

Mr. Brooks threw in claims of ineffective trial and appellate counsel, but the court makes short shrift of both those claims.