Court Opinion

ID: 9629028
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 09:35:58.804282+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:14.524913
License: Public Domain

COMPTON, Justice,
dissenting.
The language of Alaska’s Implied Consent Statutes, as they read at the time of Pena’s and Rychart’s arrests, demonstrates that the statutes were intended to apply only in the context of searches incident to arrest. A person was deemed to consent to testing when “lawfully arrested.” AS 28.-35.031. The tests were to be given “at the direction of a law enforcement officer,” id., and sanctions accrued when “a person under arrest refuse[d] the request of a law enforcement officer to submit to a chemical test....” AS 28.35.032(a).
There is simply nothing in the statutes to indicate that the legislature contemplated restricting searches pursuant to warrant, which derive from the statutory authority of the court, rather than the power of an officer to search an individual at the time of arrest. Numerous reasons have been advanced for the existence of implied consent statutes, but there is none which would support the majority’s application of the prohibition against nonconsensual blood testing to searches performed pursuant to warrant.
As we noted in Lundquist v. Department of Public Safety, 674 P.2d 780, 783 (Alaska 1983), the legislature’s purpose in enacting the Implied Consent Statutes is not clear. There we explained that such statutes were originally intended to aid police in obtaining evidence of intoxication at a time when the United States Supreme Court had put in doubt the constitutionality of non-consensual searches for evidence inside an individual’s body. However, many states, including Alaska, did not pass such laws until after the Supreme Court had made clear in Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757, 86 S.Ct. 1826, 16 L.Ed.2d 908 (1966), that forcibly extracting blood for the purpose of determining a driver’s blood alcohol content did not offend the Constitution. In Lundquist we found convincing one commentator’s statement that “[t]he most likely explanation for the wide-spread adoption of implied consent by the states despite the Schmerber decision is that the implied consent language was familiar and had been approved by the courts.” Id. at 783, quoting Note, Driving While Intoxicated and the Right to Counsel: The Case Against Implied Consent, 58 Texas L.Rev. 935, 944 (1980). Another related explanation is that in 1967 the federal Department of Transportation promulgated regulations requiring some form of implied consent law before a state could establish its eligibility to receive federal highway funds. See Note, supra at 942-43. The federal regulations were written after Schmerber, and did not require a provision prohibiting testing if no consent was given, 33 Fed.Reg. 16,562 (1968), but it is not too difficult to imagine that states, in the process of complying with the federal regulations, would look to pre-Schmerber implied consent statutes as models.
Other courts, in interpreting implied consent laws enacted after Schmerber, have decided that their purpose is to prevent the violent confrontations that might arise between police officers and drunken motorists if the officers attempted to administer, or have administered, chemical tests by force. See Note, supra at 941-2. Appellant Rychart asserts that this is the purpose of Alaska’s Implied Consent Statutes, and that it is served equally by limiting searches incident to arrest and searches *869pursuant to warrant. When a search warrant has been issued by a neutral magistrate, however, much of the potential for conflict is reduced. The accused is made aware that a judicial, officer has ordered the search; he therefore knows he is not being singled out for persecution by a police officer. Citizens are expected to submit peacefully to such court orders. As the State notes in its brief on appeal, the distinction is similar to that made by “knock and announce statutes,” which are also intended to reduce the likelihood of violence between police officers and suspects. See Lockwood v. State, 591 P.2d 969, 971 (Alaska 1979).
Thus, there is no conceivable purpose in extending the provisions of AS 28.35.032 to searches pursuant to warrant. Further, to proscribe the use of search warrants as a means of obtaining evidence of a driver’s insobriety, would be to place allegedly drunken drivers in an exalted class of criminal defendants, protected by the law from every means of obtaining the most important evidence against them. It is incredible that the legislature could have intended such a result. The 1982 amendment to the implied consent statutes permitting chemical tests to be administered over a defendant’s objections in cases where another party has been killed or seriously injured, AS 28.35.035, supports this conclusion, because it indicates that the legislature did not intend such a result even in the context of a search incident to arrest.
The language of AS 09.65.095 provides additional evidence that searches pursuant to warrant were intended to be outside the scope of the prohibition contained in AS 28.35.032. At the time of Pena’s and Ryc-hart’s arrests, it protected health care providers from civil or criminal actions for battery arising from the act of taking a blood sample when an arresting officer had “a search warrant or court order authorizing the taking of the blood sample.” After the 1982 amendments to the Implied Consent Statutes, AS 09.65.095 was also amended to include protection for health care providers who acted “at the request of a police officer under the circumstances specified in AS 28.35.035.” Thus, the legislature saw the taking of blood samples at the request of a police officer, which was legitimized under the circumstances described in AS 28.35.035 in 1982, to be distinguishable from the taking of blood samples at the direction of a judicial officer or court.
In short, I see every reason “to draw the distinction drawn by the court of appeals,” Pena v. State, 684 P.2d 864, 867 (Alaska 1984), in this case, and cannot agree with this court’s conclusion that the implied consent statutes in effect at the time of the defendants’ arrests precluded the “admission into evidence of chemical sobriety test results obtained pursuant to a search warrant after the arrestee has refused to take such a test.” Pena v. State, 684 P.2d at 866. Therefore, I dissent from the order reversing the defendants’ convictions and remanding the cases for new trials.