Page 180 - Texas police Association Peace Officer Guide 2017

Because the cooperation of the test subject is necessary when a breath test is administered and
highly preferable when a blood sample is taken, the enactment of laws defining intoxication
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based on BAC made it necessary for States to find a way of securing such cooperation. So-
called “implied consent” laws were enacted to achieve this result. They provided that
cooperation with BAC testing was a condition of the privilege of driving on state roads and that
the privilege would be rescinded if a suspected drunk driver refused to honor that condition.

In recent decades, the States and the Federal Government have toughened drunk-driving laws,
and those efforts have corresponded to a dramatic decrease in alcohol-related fatalities. Many
other States have taken a similar approach, but this new structure threatened to undermine the
effectiveness of implied consent laws. If the penalty for driving with a greatly elevated BAC or
for repeat violations exceeds the penalty for refusing to submit to testing, motorists who fear
conviction for the more severely punished offenses have an incentive to reject testing. And in
some States, the refusal rate is high. On average, over one-fifth of all drivers asked to submit to
BAC testing in 2011refused to do so.

To combat the problem of test refusal, some States have begun to enact laws making it a crime to
refuse to undergo testing.

(The Court discusses the facts of three DUI arrests which have been appealed).

We granted certiorari in all three cases and consolidated them for argument, in order to decide
whether motorists lawfully arrested for drunk driving may be convicted of a crime or otherwise
penalized for refusing to take a warrantless test measuring the alcohol in their bloodstream.

Despite these differences, success for all three petitioners depends on the proposition that the
criminal law ordinarily may not compel a motorist to submit to the taking of a blood sample or to
a breath test unless a warrant authorizing such testing is issued by a magistrate. If, on the other
hand, such warrantless searches comport with the Fourth Amendment, it follows that a State may
criminalize the refusal to comply with a demand to submit to the required testing, just as a State
may make it a crime for a person to obstruct the execution of a valid search warrant.

The question, then, is whether the warrantless searches at issue here were reasonable. In the
three cases now before us, the drivers were searched or told that they were required to submit to
a search after being placed under arrest for drunk driving. We therefore consider how the
search-incident-to-arrest doctrine applies to breath and blood tests incident to such arrests.

Our decision two Terms ago in Riley v. California … explained how the rule should be applied in
situations that could not have been envisioned when the Fourth Amendment was adopted. Id., at
___ Riley concerned a search of data contained in the memory of a modern cell phone. “Absent
more precise guidance from the founding era,” the Court wrote, “we generally determine
whether to exempt a given type of search from the warrant requirement ‘by assessing, on the one
hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy and, on the other, the degree to
which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.’”

A Peace Officer’s Guide to Texas Law 175 2017 Edition