Opinion ID: 2586146
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: exigent circumstance

Text: ¶ 15 The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution ensures [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures. U.S. Const. amend. IV. Reasonableness is the key to any Fourth Amendment analysis. See Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, 108-09, 98 S.Ct. 330, 54 L.Ed.2d 331 (1977). [1] The protection afforded by the Fourth Amendment is intended to assure each individual that as a nation we prize personal dignity and privacy and will not countenance arbitrary intrusions on those valued interests. The Fourth Amendment mandates a warrant based on probable cause and reviewed by an impartial magistrate as the operational safeguard against arbitrary police intrusions. A search or seizure conducted without the aid of a warrant is per se unreasonable. See, e.g., United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 701, 103 S.Ct. 2637, 77 L.Ed.2d 110 (1983) (In the ordinary case, the Court has viewed a seizure of personal property as per se unreasonable within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment unless it is accomplished pursuant to a judicial warrant issued upon probable cause and particularly describing the items to be seized.). ¶ 16 A reasonable warrantless search can occur only when the legitimate state interest served by the intrusion outweighs individual interests shielded by the Fourth Amendment. Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 654, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979). One class of exceptions to the warrant requirement is exigent circumstances. The words exigent circumstances suggest the nature of the legitimate state interest to which the exception refers: there must be an urgency to acquire evidence that falls outside the ordinary course of law enforcement. For instance, the completion of tasks associated with obtaining a warrant may place the safety of the police officers or the public at unacceptable risk or result in the destruction of essential evidence necessary to prosecute a crime. See, e.g., Camara v. Mun. Ct. of San Francisco, 387 U.S. 523, 534, 87 S.Ct. 1727, 18 L.Ed.2d 930 (1967) (safety of the public); State v. Larocco, 794 P.2d 460, 470-71 (Utah 1990) (safety of police and risk of loss of evidence); State v. Limb, 581 P.2d 142, 144 (Utah 1978) (risk of loss of evidence). ¶ 17 The United States Supreme Court has assigned presumptive exigent circumstances status to certain classes of limited intrusions. For example, in recognition of the safety risks confronting a police officer who makes a traffic stop, the Supreme Court has authorized officers, without a warrant, to run a background check of a driver and passengers and, in addition, to order a driver and passengers out of the vehicle. See, e.g., Maryland v. Wilson, 519 U.S. 408, 410, 117 S.Ct. 882, 137 L.Ed.2d 41 (1997) (noting that officers may order a passenger out of the vehicle); United States v. Holt, 264 F.3d 1215, 1221 (10th Cir.2001) (noting that officers may run a background check of vehicle occupants for their own safety). ¶ 18 The State contends that there is a recognized general exigency of evidence destruction which applies to warrantless blood draws. Had the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment permits police to conduct a warrantless blood draw whenever evidence of alcohol is present, the task before us would be easy. However, the fact that it has not so held places us in the position of following a course that is part divination and part pragmatism. ¶ 19 We engage in divination when, employing what we might ambitiously call a principled approach to prophecy, we attempt to predict how the United States Supreme Court might decide the question before us. This is a perilous activity. As we will see when we take up the clearest pronouncement of the Supreme Court on the issue of alcohol and warrants, the Supreme Court could have created forty years ago the very categorical exigent circumstance rule for alcohol that the State now seeks. But it did not. We are not easily convinced that the Supreme Court has changed its mind on this question and merely awaits the appearance of the case that will permit it to make its intentions known to all. ¶ 20 Any discussion of exigency and blood-alcohol evidence takes place on terrain covered by the long shadow cast by Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966). Several of Schmerber's most important facts are replayed in the events here. Mr. Schmerber and his friend had been drinking at a tavern. The two individuals left the tavern in an automobile driven by Mr. Schmerber. The auto crossed the road, skidded, and struck a tree. Both Mr. Schmerber and his passenger were injured and taken to a hospital for treatment. Believing alcohol contributed to the accident, a police officer arrested Mr. Schmerber and directed a physician to draw a sample of his blood. The officer did not obtain a warrant. Id. at 758 n. 2, 86 S.Ct. 1826. ¶ 21 Presented with these facts, the Court first concluded that warrantless searches involving intrusions into the human body implicate the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 767-68, 86 S.Ct. 1826. The Court then found in such cases that the Fourth Amendment's proper function is to constrain, not against all intrusions as such, but against intrusions which are not justified in the circumstances, or which are made in an improper manner. Id. at 768, 86 S.Ct. 1826. The Court thus rejected the notion that bodily intrusions undertaken to obtain evidence were categorically unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment and concluded that the state could penetrate a person's body to obtain evidence under certain circumstances. The challenge lay in identifying what those circumstances were. ¶ 22 The Court was satisfied that the police officer had probable cause to arrest Mr. Schmerber, but also noted that the probable cause sufficient to effect an arrest was not the same probable cause necessary to conduct a search of a person's body. This is because probable cause to conduct a search involves a concept foreign to the probable cause required to justify an arrest: the expectation of privacy. ¶ 23 The concept of expectation of privacy features prominently in the vocabulary of the Fourth Amendment. It functions as a tool to gauge the reasonableness of a search. The Schmerber Court acknowledged that the interest that poses the most substantial countervailing force to a community's interest in effective law enforcement is the dignity and integrity of the human body. Justice Brennan later explained Schmerber in these terms: [t]he intrusion perhaps implicated Schmerber's most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy, and the Court recognized that Fourth Amendment analysis thus required a discerning inquiry into the facts and circumstances to determine whether the intrusion was justifiable. Winston v. Lee, 470 U.S. 753, 760, 105 S.Ct. 1611, 84 L.Ed.2d 662 (1985). ¶ 24 The heightened expectation of privacy associated with the human body meant that probable cause to conduct a body search had to be grounded on something more than mere suspicion. Rather, sufficient probable cause was present only where there was a clear indication that . . . evidence will be found. Id. at 762, 105 S.Ct. 1611 (citation and quotation marks omitted). ¶ 25 The significance assigned to the elevated expectation of privacy for one's body not only led the Court to impose a more rigorous standard for probable cause, but also prompted the Court to emphasize the importance of acquiring a warrant in advance of conducting a bodily intrusion. As the Court stated in Schmerber and reiterated in Winston: Search warrants are ordinarily required for searches of dwellings, and, absent an emergency, no less could be required where intrusions into the human body are concerned. . . . The importance of informed, detached and deliberate determinations of the issue whether or not to invade another's body in search of evidence of guilt is indisputable and great. Winston, 470 U.S. at 761, 105 S.Ct. 1611 (quoting Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 770, 86 S.Ct. 1826). ¶ 26 The State holds the view that the reverse is true. The State argues that drawing blood is a significantly lesser intrusion into a person's privacy than an intrusion into a home, automobile, or non-invasive body search. This assertion misunderstands the privacy inquiry. Invasive body searches implicate the most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy, a privacy which is not present in searches of homes, automobiles, or clothing. Id. at 760, 86 S.Ct. 1826. ¶ 27 That a blood draw is a minor matter in the realm of invasive procedures and one that is commonly performed does not alter the fact that it is an invasion of the human body and subject to a heightened expectation of privacy. Id. at 762, 86 S.Ct. 1826 (The blood test procedure has become routine in our everyday life.). Justice Marshall explained this point in his dissent in Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 644, 109 S.Ct. 1402, 103 L.Ed.2d 639 (1989). There, Justice Marshall reminds the Court that Schmerber does not teach that blood draws do not infringe significant privacy interests merely because they have become commonplace. The commonness, comfort, and safety of Mr. Schmerber's blood draw became relevant only after [the Court] established that the blood test fell within the `exigent circumstances' exception to the warrant requirement, and established that the test was supported by probable cause. Skinner, 489 U.S. at 645 n. 7, 109 S.Ct. 1402 (emphasis in original). ¶ 28 We are careful to note that, although Mr. Schmerber was under arrest at the time his blood was drawn, and the Court characterized the blood draw as an appropriate incident to [defendant's] arrest, the Court took pains to note that the mere fact of a lawful arrest does not end our inquiry. Schmerber, 384 U.S. at 769, 771, 86 S.Ct. 1826. [2] The Schmerber Court understandably concluded that searches directed at safeguarding arresting officers have little applicability with respect to searches involving intrusions beyond the body's surface. Id. at 769, 86 S.Ct. 1826. ¶ 29 The Court then turned its attention to the absence of a warrant. It concluded that the officers acted lawfully when they obtained the defendant's blood without a warrant because blood-alcohol content begins to drop shortly after drinking ends, time had been taken to transport the defendant to a hospital and to investigate the accident scene, and the necessity to seek out a magistrate and secure a warrant would require even more time. Id. at 770-71, 86 S.Ct. 1826. ¶ 30 Contrary to the assertion of the State, Schmerber does not stand for the proposition that the loss of evidence of a person's blood-alcohol level through the dissipation of alcohol from the body was a sufficient exigency to justify a warrantless blood draw. Rather, these three categories of special facts combined to create the exigency. The evanescence of blood-alcohol was never special enough to create an exigent circumstance by itself. ¶ 31 The guarded language employed by Justice Brennan to define the Court's holding in Schmerber reinforces our conclusion that the Court did not intend a categorical recognition of blood-alcohol exigency. Justice Brennan stated [t]hat we today hold that the Constitution does not forbid the States' minor intrusions into an individual's body under stringently limited conditions in no way indicates that it permits more substantial intrusions, or intrusions under other conditions. Id. at 772, 86 S.Ct. 1826. We can uncover no endorsement of a per se rule in this statement of the Schmerber holding. ¶ 32 The Court confronted a more substantial intrusion in Winston, 470 U.S. 753, 105 S.Ct. 1611. There, the Commonwealth of Virginia sought to compel a robbery suspect to undergo surgery to remove a bullet lodged in his chest. The Court held that such surgery would be an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment both because extracting the bullet would intrude substantially on the suspect's privacy and security interests and because the state had failed to demonstrate a compelling need for the bullet. The Court noted that in cases of intrusions below the skin, Schmerber required that several considerations be accounted for before the interests of an individual would yield to the state's interest in prosecuting a crime: (1) officials must have probable cause for the search, (2) the procedure used must be reasonable, and (3) there must be minimal intrusion upon the person's personal privacy and bodily integrity. Winston, 470 U.S. at 761-62, 105 S.Ct. 1611. ¶ 33 It is true that the Winston Court emphasized Schmerber's characterization of blood tests as minimally intrusive, in contrast to the surgical removal of the bullet from Mr. Winston. Winston, 470 U.S. at 761-62, 105 S.Ct. 1611. The Court also reaffirmed the reasonableness of blood draws, holding that a state's interest in proving alcohol impairment to enforce its drunk driving laws was sufficient to justify the intrusion, and the compelled blood test was thus `reasonable' for Fourth Amendment purposes. Id. at 763, 105 S.Ct. 1611. ¶ 34 However, Winston involved a unique factual situation. The Court's holding demonstrates its continued adherence to the core elements of Schmerber. Id. at 761-62, 86 S.Ct. 1826. Winston did not, and because no blood draw was involved, could not, announce that warrantless blood draws to measure alcohol content were per se justified under the exigent circumstances doctrine. ¶ 35 Although the State takes pains to provide a roster of lower federal and state courts that have found that the temporary presence of alcohol in the blood creates sufficient urgency to justify a warrantless blood-alcohol test, in none of these cases was exigency established by the presence of alcohol alone. Rather, either exigency was not at issue or the court pointed to delays in the warrant acquisition process as circumstances that would suffice to create an exigency. ¶ 36 Two of the cases cited by the State come close to ceding alcohol per se exigency status: State v. Cocio, 147 Ariz. 277, 709 P.2d 1336 (1985), and State v. Bohling, 173 Wis.2d 529, 494 N.W.2d 399 (1993). We read Cocio, however, as allowing the police to obtain, without a warrant, a portion of blood that has already been drawn from the body for other valid medical reasons. The intrusion was not, then, a governmental act. For its part, Bohling allowed a warrantless blood draw solely for the purpose of determining blood-alcohol incident to arresta state of affairs which we are not faced with today. Bohling also rested its conclusion that alcohol has obtained per se exigency status on several points with which we cannot agree. These include what we consider to be a flawed reading of Schmerber, 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826, and a misapplication of Skinner a point highlighted by the Bohling dissent. [3] Furthermore, we find ourselves in agreement with the three justices of the Bohling dissent who concluded, The legislative intent behind the telephonic warrant procedure is to encourage use of warrants and minimize resort to warrantless searches when circumstances might otherwise be exigent. Bohling, 494 N.W.2d at 408 n. 7 (citing United States v. Talkington, 843 F.2d 1041, 1046-47 (7th Cir. 1988) (citing 1977 Amendment to Federal Rule 41, advisory committee notes)). ¶ 37 We are wary of embracing holdings from other state courts that have applied the Fourth Amendment to warrantless blood-alcohol tests for a more fundamental reason. The premise that fuels the State's claim to per se exigency status for blood-alcohol tests is that owing to the evanescent quality of blood-alcohol evidence, the delays that accompany the acquisition of a warrant threaten to place useful evidence beyond the reach of law enforcement. The State assumes, without evidence or authority, that the attempt to obtain a warrant where blood-alcohol evidence is sought will always be accompanied by unacceptable delay. But what if a warrant can be obtained expeditiously? We believe that there is substantial reason to believe this is possible. ¶ 38 The rules for obtaining a warrant include a minimum of universally applicable standards: the warrant must be upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment leaves to others the details of how to go about obtaining a warrant. The astonishing advances that have marked communications and information technology over recent decades have dramatically pared back the physical obstacles to warrant acquisition. ¶ 39 Court rules and legislative enactments sometimes keep pace with this technology. Sometimes they do not. Prior to 1980, a peace officer or prosecuting attorney would be required to obtain the physical presence of a magistrate so that she might examine the complainant, take written depositions (affidavits), and sign the warrant. Utah Code Ann. § 77-54-4 (1978). This would obviously take an unacceptable amount of time in many cases. In State v. Jasso, 21 Utah 2d 24, 439 P.2d 844 (1968), we suppressed evidence where an Ogden police officer personally applied to a judge for a search warrant at his residence late at night. The judge was of the opinion that the written affidavit supplied by the officer was insufficient to issue a warrant. The judge then swore the officer as a witness and questioned him until obtaining sufficient grounds to issue a warrant based upon this oral deposition. Nonetheless, we held that the evidence later obtained should have been suppressed because the statute in effect at the time, Utah Code Ann. § 77-54-4 (1978), did not allow the issuance of a warrant from an oral deposition. Clearly, significantly more time was involved in obtaining a warrant at that time than today. ¶ 40 Over the past twenty-five years, all branches of Utah's government have participated in overseeing an evolution of the warrant acquisition process. Under current rules, police can readily obtain a warrant, in most circumstances, in a very short amount of time. As far back as 1980, Utah Code section 77-7-10 allowed a magistrate to issue a warrant by telegraph, telephone or other reasonable means. Likewise, section 77-23-204 allowed a magistrate to consider sworn oral testimony via telephone or other reasonable means in lieu of an affidavit and allowed the magistrate to direct the requesting officer to affix the magistrate's name to the warrant in lieu of signature. ¶ 41 More recently, in 2005, the legislature revised section 77-23-204 to further streamline the process. The statute now simply states, A remotely communicated search warrant issued under Rule 40 of the Rules of Criminal Procedure shall be served in a written form upon the person or place to be served. The new statute allows us to maintain pace with technological developments which might speed and ease the warrant process by adjustments to rule 40 of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedurewhich rule controls the issuance of remote warrants. Currently rule 40 allows that [a]ll communication between the magistrate and the peace officer or prosecuting attorney requesting the warrant may be remotely transmitted by voice, image, text, or any combination of those, or by other means. Utah. R. Civ. P. 40. ¶ 42 We whole-heartedly endorse the comments of the advisory committee, which state that the rule is intended to be interpreted liberally in order to facilitate remote communications as a means of applying for and issuing search warrants while preserving the integrity of the probable cause application and the terms of warrants that are authorized. We are confident that, were law enforcement officials to take advantage of available technology to apply for warrants, the significance of delay in the exigency analysis would markedly diminish. ¶ 43 Case law in this area is of little help. It is virtually impossible to extract from blood-alcohol related Fourth Amendment cases a meaningful understanding of the standard against which the court is measuring delay. Were telephonic warrants available? We are seldom told. Yet, we know that the delay associated with telephonic warrants need not be great. See United States v. Baker, 520 F.Supp. 1080, 1083 (D.Iowa 1981) (finding that one hour and fifteen minutes was abundant time to obtain warrant by telephone, a process that often takes no more than thirty minutes). We also know that the Mesa Police Department is able to obtain a warrant within as little as fifteen minutes and that delays of only fifteen to forty-five minutes are commonplace. State v. Flannigan, 194 Ariz. 150, 978 P.2d 127, 131 (App.1998). The record in this case does not disclose how much time would likely have been required for the officers to secure a warrant to extract Ms. Rodriguez's blood. We are confident, however, that courts and law enforcement officials in Utah, particularly in our urban regions, would have the wherewithal to duplicate the warrant acquisition standards of Mesa, Arizona. We agree with the sentiment of that case: The mere possibility of delay does not give rise to an exigency. Id. ¶ 44 Was a magistrate readily available to review the warrant application? If not, why not? In Schmerber, the most definitive commentary by the United States Supreme Court on the subject of warrants, exigent circumstances and blood-alcohol tests, the Court tells us that the police officer was required to appear before a magistrate and implies that magistrates were not particularly easy to locate. 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826. In 1966, the Justices of the Supreme Court could not reasonably have foreseen the ubiquity of the cell phone, and only those conversant with the futuristic imaginings of science fiction would have been capable of describing the gadgetry that equips the interior of the typical police cruiser today. ¶ 45 Nor could the Court in 1966 have foreseen the evolution of law enforcement sophistication and professionalism that has occurred over the past forty years. The United States Supreme Court recently took note of this important development when it ended the application of the exclusionary rule as a sanction for violations of a police officer's obligation to knock and announce his presence before entering a dwelling to execute a warrant. Hudson v. Michigan, ___ U.S. ___, 126 S.Ct. 2159, 165 L.Ed.2d 56 (2006). Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Scalia observed: Another development over the past half-century that deters civil-rights violations is the increasing professionalism of police forces. . . . Numerous sources are now available to teach officers and their supervisors what is required of them under this Court's cases, how to respect constitutional guarantees in various situations, and how to craft an effective regime for internal discipline. Id. at 2168. ¶ 46 Were we to adopt a rule of per se exigency for alcohol-related blood seizures, we would remove much of the incentive to pursue progressive approaches to warrant acquisition that preserve the protections afforded by the warrant while meeting the legitimate interests of law enforcement. Today, Utah Rule of Criminal Procedure 40 exploits communications and information technology in the cause of making warrants more readily obtainable without compromising the core constitutional considerations of authenticity and impartiality. In most cases, a police officer has readily at hand several methods of applying for a search warrant from the scene of an accident, a medical facility, or any other location where probable cause has been established. ¶ 47 The State takes issue with the court of appeals' disapproving reaction to the fact that the officer who authorized the warrantless seizure of Ms. Rodriguez's blood never considered obtaining a warrant. The State appears to hold the view that a per se exigency rule is necessary in part because the typical police officer could not be expected to successfully complete an evaluation of the array of considerations that together comprise the totality of circumstances upon which a judgment about a warrant is made. ¶ 48 The court of appeals noted that the officer viewed the blood draw merely as a routine matter in the aftermath of an alcohol-related accident. The State is on target when it notes that the officer's subjective belief is not relevant to an assessment of the reasonableness of his actions and also misses the point of the court's reference to the officer's absence of warrant awareness. It is clear to us that the court was disturbed by what the record suggests to be an instance of institutional disregard of a fundamental constitutional safeguard of individual rights: the warrant. ¶ 49 A police officer who has not even considered the potential need for a warrant will not, of course, be required to possess any skill or sensitivity in identifying and evaluating the state of the actual exigencies that confront him. Amici curiae suggest that it might be too much to ask a police officer to investigate every alcohol-related incident with the presumption that a blood draw must be supported by a warrant. Amici contend there is simply too much for a police officer to do and to think about to realistically expect the officer to take on the added burden of evaluating the availability of a warrant. This court, like the court of appeals, is confident that the law enforcement officers of this state are suitably equipped with the talent, training, and experience to permit them to exercise sound judgment when they conclude that an investigation would benefit from the acquisition of blood-alcohol evidence. ¶ 50 Finally, we believe that destruction of evidence brought on by the involuntary metabolic processes of the human body presents a less compelling case for exigency than do more traditional and volitional methods of evidence destruction. There exists considerable scientific literature on the subject of whether reliable conclusions about blood-alcohol concentrations at a prior time may be extrapolated from a test performed on blood drawn later. The State and amici cite numerous articles that question the reliability and utility of retrograde analysis of blood-alcohol evidence. Ms. Rodriguez counters with her own substantial bibliography. Who has the better science is not the question here. The fact that there has been serious scientific inquiry attempting to develop reliable methods to calculate past blood-alcohol concentrations is what is important. The same could not be said for more commonplace forms of evidence destruction, the use of toilets being the most prominent among them. We are unwilling to render ongoing scientific research into blood-alcohol dissipation rates irrelevant by bestowing categorical exigency status on seizures of blood.