Source: https://www.marylandduilawyer-blog.com/category/federal-duis/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 06:38:31+00:00

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Federal DUIs Category Archives — Maryland DUI Lawyer Blog Published by Maryland DUI Attorneys — Goldstein & Stamm, P.A.
The Hawaii Supreme Court announced its decision today in State v. Won. The court held that where a suspect in a DUI case is told that it is a crime to refuse to submit to an alcohol test, that consent to submit to the test is coerced and invalid because it is not voluntary. The Fourth Amendment requires that searches be conducted pursuant to a search warrant or the government must rely on an exception to the warrant requirement. In most DUI cases, the government relies on consent to justify warrantless breath and blood tests. However, some jurisdictions have criminalized refusal to submit to a test, providing that refusal can result in a jail sentence.
Where arrest, conviction, and imprisonment are threatened if consent to search is not given, the threat infringes upon and oppresses the unfettered will and free choice of the person to whom it is made, whether by calculation or effect.30 See id. at 261-63, 925 P.2d at 829-31 (finding that a permissive response to a request to search the defendant resulted only from “inherently coercive” circumstances that were “calculated to overbear [the defendant’s] will”); Pauʻu, 72 Haw. at 508, 824 P.2d at 835 (same). Thus, the threat of the criminal sanction communicated by the Implied Consent Form for refusal to submit to a BAC test is inherently coercive. [Footnotes omitted].
The Court of Appeals announced its decision in Norton v. State today. I was privileged to have been local counsel on the amicus brief filed by the Innocence Network in this case. The case was a win for Norton, but more importantly, it was a win for all defendants who wish to confront scientific evidence offered against them in court.
The rules governing application of the Confrontation Clause have been changing over the past few years. A series of cases had helped to expand the ability of defendants to confront scientific evidence: Crawford v. Washington, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, and Bullcoming v. New Mexico. These cases required the State to produce in court a chemist who actually tested a defendant’s blood in a DUI case. I was also privileged to have helped to write the amicus brief filed in Bullcoming by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National College for DUI Defense.
Unfortunately, in Williams v. Illinois, the Supreme Court backtracked and ruled that in a DNA case, the State did not have to produce the analyst. However, there was no majority for what became a plurality opinion of four justices. There were also four justices in dissent. The deciding vote was cast by Justice Thomas, who agreed with the dissenting justices with respect to their reasoning but voted to not require confrontation because the document stating what the DNA results were was not sufficiently formal. This confusing alignment of justices brought into question what rule should be applied by the lower courts.
In this blog, I want to weave a couple of strands of thought together here on the Fourth and Fifth of July, as I complete the 2015 update for the 8th edition of my Maryland DUI Law.
As defense lawyers, we are trained to look for the good facts in our cases, and the good traits of our clients, so that we may use the good to persuade judges and juries at trial, and judges at sentencing. What we find is that there are very few people that are all good or all bad. At the same time many of us, through one path or another, end up advocating on particular issues. The issues we may end up being most involved with are not necessarily the most noble, but with so many issues and so little time, we must pick and choose.
Two issues that I am particularly proud of having had the opportunity to argue for are Fourth Amendment issues, the constitutional right to be free from unreasonable and/or illegal searches and seizures, and the Sixth Amendment right of confrontation, guaranteeing that witnesses testifying against our clients be present in the courtroom to be cross-examined. I helped to write amicus briefs in both the Fourth Amendment case of Missouri v. McNeely, and the Sixth Amendment case of Bullcoming v. New Mexico. In McNeely, the Supreme Court held that dispensing with a warrant to obtain a blood sample in a DUI case should never be the norm. In Bullcoming, the Supreme Court held that the actual chemist who tested the defendant’s blood must be present in court for cross-examination. These are important cases, and the government and many lower court judges are doing everything they can to work around them.
Last week the Supreme Court decided the case of Heien v. North Carolina. In an 8-1 decision, the Court decided that even though an officer stopped a driver for conduct that was later decided NOT to be illegal, that the officer’s objectively reasonable belief that the conduct was illegal saved the stop from violating the Fourth Amendment. Surprisingly, some of the justices that can usually be counted on to protect the privacy rights of Americans, namely Justices Scalia (yes he is one of the better ones on Fourth Amendment issues), Ginsburg, Kagan, and, frequently Kennedy, failed to do so in this case. Only Justice Sotomayor dissented from the decision in Heien.
The Heien case dealt with what I will call the two versus three brake light issue. Many states enacted laws requiring two brake lights on cars and also laws requiring all equipment on a car to be working. The two brake light laws were enacted at a time when cars only had two brake lights. Since the enactment of these laws, many cars have been made with three brake lights. As is not uncommon, in many states the law has lagged behind technology. In those states, there has been a legitimate debate about whether a car with three brake lights, and one out, was in violation of the law.
In Heien, the officer stopped a car with three brake lights, and one out. Drugs were found in the car, which is why Heien challenged the stop. The trial court denied his motion to suppress and Heien appealed. Subsequently, the North Carolina Court of Appeals held that two working brake lights were all that was required and reversed. (Maryland requires three). The North Carolina Supreme Court reversed and upheld the conviction, even though the State did not challenge the intermediate court’s ruling on the brake light law. So Heien appealed to the Supreme Court.
One might have thought that when the North Carolina intermediate appellate court ruled that Heine’s vehicle was not in violation of North Carolina law, and that the ruling was not challenged, that it’s conclusion that the stop was illegal would have been upheld, even though the quesstion was debatable at the time the officer stopped Heien. However, the Supreme Court ultimately held that because the officer’s belief that Heien’s vehicle was violating North Carolina law although wrong was objectively reasonable, the stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment. It is important to note that the Court did not say in Heien, as it has said in some cases, that although the officer violated the Fourth Amendment that the exclusionary rule should not apply where a statute or court decision requires the officer to act in a way that is later held to violate the Fourth Amendment. In Heien, the Court held that the officer’s stop did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

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