Opinion ID: 1121458
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Motion to Suppress Analysis of Defendant's Blood

Text: (15a) Defendant contends that the Mendocino County Superior Court violated his rights under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and article I, section 13 of the California Constitution by failing to suppress the results of tests performed on the sample of his blood that was drawn shortly after his arrest. We conclude that the results of the blood tests were properly admitted. (16)(See fn. 19.) We need not address the merits of defendant's contentions relating to the existence or absence of probable cause to draw defendant's blood at the time it was drawn, because we conclude that the doctrine of inevitable discovery would validate the lower court's ruling in any event. [19] (15b) As the Attorney General persuasively argues, approximately 30 minutes after defendant's blood was drawn, defendant gave the Taped Statement in which he admitted that he had ingested several different drugs on the night of the murder, including Valium, methamphetamine, marijuana, and alcohol. The Taped Statement was legally obtained. As a result of defendant's revelations concerning his drug usage on the night in question, the police inevitably would have drawn defendant's blood. Furthermore, following these revelations there was probable cause to draw defendant's blood and exigent circumstances creating an exception to the warrant requirement were also present since defendant's body was metabolizing the evidence and delay could have resulted in destruction of the evidence sought. (See Schmerber v. California (1966) 384 U.S. 757, 770-771 [16 L.Ed.2d 908, 919-920, 86 S.Ct. 1826].) We recognize that metabolization of the substances in defendant's bloodstream would have continued in the 30 minutes to an hour between the time that defendant's blood was actually extracted and the time it inevitably would have been extracted following his Taped Statement. It is common, however, for experts to take into account the metabolization rate of a substance and extrapolate from the amount of a substance in a blood sample to arrive at an opinion regarding the amount of the substance in the blood at a critical point in time. Indeed, the expert testimony in this case was based upon this methodology. The expert testimony on the metabolization rates of the drugs detected in defendant's blood sample supports the Attorney General's argument that the blood sample that inevitably would have been drawn following the Taped Statement would have provided essentially the same information revealed by the blood sample that was actually drawn. For these reasons, we conclude that the trial court's ruling was correct under the doctrine of inevitable discovery. (See, e.g., Nix v. Williams (1984) 467 U.S. 431 [81 L.Ed.2d 377, 104 S.Ct. 2501]; Green v. Superior Court, supra, 40 Cal.3d at pp. 136-139; People v. Superior Court ( Tunch ) (1978) 80 Cal. App.3d 665 [145 Cal. Rptr. 795]; cf. People v. Siripongs (1988) 45 Cal.3d 548, 568-569 [247 Cal. Rptr. 729, 754 P.2d 1306].)