Court Opinion

ID: 9735205
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:05:16.459136+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:43:38.767193
License: Public Domain

WAHL, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. The DRE protocol on which a law enforcement officer bases an assessment of drug impairment is an emerging technique that must meet our Frye/Mack standard for scientific evidence. The trial court viewed the components of the DRE protocol separately and concluded that, except for the use of the HGN and vertical nystagmus tests, there is nothing new, novel, or controversial about any single component. With respect to the HGN and vertical nys-tagmus tests, the court concluded that the state had met its burden of showing that these tests are generally accepted as reliable indicators of impairment and thus satisfy the Frye standard. The court also did not find anything new or controversial about the “symptomatology matrix” used by the DREs to reach their’ conclusions or about allowing a police officer to give an opinion that an individual is impaired. Therefore, the court found that the DRE protocol is not a novel scientific technique requiring that experts in the “field” generally agree that the evidence is reliable. As the testimony of Sergeant Page and Trooper Daly suggests, however, the protocol cannot be easily separated into its several steps but it is an assessment based on “the totality” of an officer’s observations.
The trial court is right, of course, that there is “nothing new or controversial about allowing a police officer to give an opinion that an individual is impaired,” but a police officer’s application of medical or scientific tests and the rendering of an opinion on drug impairment based on those tests is an “emerging technique” that warrants a Frye inquiry. This is so because the field to which the technique belongs is not just law enforcement and forensics, as the state claims, but includes elements from the medical and neurological fields as well.
The Frye/Mack test, as set out in orn-eases, states that when determining admissibility of evidence based on emerging scientific techniques, we require “that experts in the field widely share the view that the results of [scientific testing] are scientifically reliable as accurate.” State v. Mack, 292 N.W.2d 764, 768 (Minn.1980) (evidence obtained by hypnosis). See State v. Jobe, 486 N.W.2d 407, 419 (Minn.1992) (DNA evidence); State v. Fenney, 448 N.W.2d 54, 57 (Minn.1989) (electrophoresis); State v. Schwartz, 447 N.W.2d 422, 424 (Minn.1989) (DNA testing); State v. Anderson, 379 N.W.2d 70, 79 (Minn.1985) (graphological personality assessment); State v. Kolander, 236 Minn. 209, 219-22, 52 N.W.2d 458, 464-66 (1952) (lie detector test).
In the criminal context with its constitutional implications, it is not too much to require that expert testimony be accurate, valid, and reliable. No one doubts that an officer’s assessment of drug impairment based on the personal observations and medi*587cal or scientific tests of the DRE protocol is expert testimony. Therefore, the DRE protocol must be tested for both its validity/ae-curacy, the ability to measure what it is supposed to measure, and its reliability, the consistency in obtaining the same results each time the procedure is performed. See Renee A. Forinash, Analyzing Scientific Evidence: From Validity to Reliability with a Two-Step Approach, 24 St. Mary’s L.J. 223, 237-38 (1992).
The DRE protocol can be tested, but it has not yet been tested properly. None of the four studies1 the trial court cites to support its conclusion that the DRE protocol is reasonably rehable in determining whether an individual is impaired by drugs prove that the DRE is a valid or reliable protocol for predicting drug impairment.2 Evidence introduced at the trial court hearing indicated that none of the studies administered the DRE protocol in a blind fashion so as to insure their validity. In each study the DRE knew in advance that the suspect had already admitted to using drugs or that drugs or drug paraphernalia were found on or near the suspect at the time of his arrest—thus unblinding the study and tainting the DRE’s evaluation. None of the studies provided for more than one DRE to evaluate the same subject, making it impossible to compare and judge the accuracy of the evaluations. None of the studies measured evaluation under the DRE protocol against the correct standard of ability to safely operate a motor vehicle— Minnesota law prohibits driving a motor vehicle while impaired by a controlled substance; it does not prohibit driving a motor vehicle with drugs present in one’s urine. All experts agreed that the mere presence of drugs in a person’s system does not mean the person is impaired.
Persons driving motor vehicles under the influence of a controlled substance should be apprehended and convicted, but they should not be convicted by the force of an opinion of impairment based on and enhanced by a DRE protocol which has not been proved to be valid and reliable. A study specifically designed to evaluate the validity and reliability of the protocol is currently under way at the Addiction Research Center in the National Institute on Drug Abuse at Johns Hopkins University. In this study scales are being designed for each component of the DRE protocol so that different DREs can evaluate the same subject and a comparison can be made of their evaluations. Experienced drug users are being recruited. The study will be doubleblind in that the DREs will not be allowed to ask persons questions about their drug use prior to the evaluation.
I would conclude that the evidence in this case does not establish that the DRE protocol meets the Frye/Mack standard and that an opinion on impairment based on that protocol is inadmissible.

. The Johns Hopkins Study (1984) was a controlled study at Johns Hopkins University in which specific drug doses were administered to volunteer subjects who were then rated by four Los Angeles DREs. The Los Angeles Study (1986) was a held study at the LAPD in which DREs evaluated suspects who were arrested for driving under the influence of a drug or of drugs and alcohol. Blood samples from 173 suspects and the toxicological results of those samples were compared with the DRE opinions. The Arizona Study (1990) compiled 526 cases in which the toxicological results of urine samples were compared with the DRE opinions. The same comparison was made with 71 cases in the Minnesota Study (1993).

. This was the testimony of both Dr. Jeffrey Ja-nofsky, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University and who is an expert on research development, design, and review, and Dr. John Morgan.