Court Opinion

ID: 9861617
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 00:13:38.257689+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:28:42.481886
License: Public Domain

CARTER, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent. I believe the district court’s order suppressing the chemical test results in the present case is consistent with the result which we approved in State v. Brown, 337 N.W.2d 507 (Iowa 1983). The same features of fundamental fairness in the adversary process are involved in both cases.
In arriving at our result in Brown, we relied, in part, on decisions of courts in other states which have refused to allow evidence of chemical tests for blood alcohol conducted by law enforcement officers who have merely recorded the test results and failed to preserve the specimens which had been tested. It has been observed that this procedure has the effect of forcing the defendant and the courts and juries who are charged with deciding the cases to accept the prosecution’s analysis at face value without any means of independent verification. At least three of the cases condemning this practice which were relied on in Brown are decisions involving failure to preserve breath samples. These include: Lauderdale v. State, 548 P.2d 376, 382 (Alaska 1976); People v. Hitch, 12 Cal.3d 641, 649-51, 527 P.2d 361, 367-69, 117 Cal.Rptr. 9, 14-16 (1974); and Garcia v. District Court, Twenty-First Judicial District, 197 Colo. 38, 46-47, 589 P.2d 924, 929-30 (1979).
A review of our decision in Brown leads to the conclusion that the holding of the case is derived from principles of fundamental fairness which we independently concluded were required to satisfy due process. Although federal court decisions *177were discussed in Brown, those decisions were deemed to be pertinent rather than controlling. Reference made in Brown to Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83, 83 S.Ct. 1194, 10 L.Ed.2d 215 (1963), does not suggest that the decision controlled the issue presented. When this court acts in this manner, I believe we are, necessarily, interpreting state constitutional law because of our own constitutional role. Stated somewhat differently, what we deem to be required by due process, based on our sense of fundamental fairness, becomes the test of due process under article I, section 9 of the Iowa Constitution.
Similarly, I believe those state court decisions 1 which have suppressed evidence of chemical blood alcohol tests when the authorities have failed to preserve the specimen have also been prompted by these same principles of fundamental fairness rather than an applied analysis of federal law under Brady.
As a point of beginning, it must be noted that the State seeks to use the intoxilyzer results as scientific evidence. This is a misrepresentation of its real character. In the present case, a biochemist testified that verifiability of the results of a chemical test is a condition precedent to scientific acceptance of the test results.2
The State seeks to deal with this problem by asserting that tests conducted on an Intoxilyzer Model 4011A have proven to be accurate when the devices have been tested by analyzing samples of known chemical composition. This argument completely misses the point. What is at issue in these cases is not the accuracy of the Intoxilyzer Model 4011A generally, or in selected cases, but the accused’s entitlement to check upon the accuracy of the analysis in his or her own particular case. Defendant’s expert witness indicated that testing the machine with samples of known blood alcohol content only establishes the accuracy of the unit in testing that sample. In contrast, the accuracy of an analysis of a sample of breath where the blood alcohol content is unknown can only be assured by a second testing of the same sample or a contemporaneously conducted chemical test of another type on the same subject. Under the procedure which the majority approves, there is no way in which this can be done.
In cases where the issue of whether an accused was driving is not an issue, this circumstance will permit the ultimate determination of guilt to be made by a machine conducted by an operator trained only in the mechanical requirements of its use and unfamiliar with the scientific principles underlying its operation. I submit that such a procedure is fundamentally unfair, and the State should not be permitted to use the test results.
Contrary to the position adopted by the majority, there are no guarantees of reliability and accuracy contained in the State’s procedure which overcomes the unfairness of the foregoing procedure. Nor does an accused have a meaningful opportunity to secure an independent test on his own initiative. When pressed in oral argument to delineate the extent of the State’s obligation to aid an arrested person in securing an independent chemical test, counsel for the State in the present case responded that the State’s obligation is merely not to interfere with the person’s efforts to secure such a test.
At the suppression hearing in the present case, a deputy sheriff testified that the policy at the jail where defendant was incarcerated at the time the chapter 321B procedures were invoked was to advise persons who requested an independent test *178that “it would be up to them to obtain a doctor to come to the jail to administer it.”
The chapter 321B procedures in the present case were conducted at 3:00 a.m. I believe we may take judicial notice of the fact that most arrests for operating under the influence take place when medical facilities are either closed or operated with skeleton staffs. The defendant in the present case had no reasonable likelihood at the time indicated of securing a licensed physician or physician’s assistant to come to the county jail within the limited time a meaningful test sample could be obtained.
If the extent of the State’s obligation is as it contends, merely not to interfere with a defendant’s efforts, this case is no different from Brown. Surely, the State had no right to interfere with the defendant in Brown had he asked the hospital personnel to perform a second blood test. The only meaningful distinction is that had both the defendant in Brown and the defendant in the present case sought to obtain independent chemical tests, only the defendant in Brown would have had any meaningful opportunity to obtain one. I would affirm the district court.
WOLLE, J., joins this dissent.

. In addition to those state court decisions involving breath analysis which were cited in Brown, similar results have been reached in Municipality of Anchorage v. Serrano, 649 P.2d 256 (Alaska App.1982) and Baca v. Smith, 124 Ariz. 353, 604 P.2d 617 (1979).

. The record reflects that the manufacturers of other types of breath testing devices have recognized this requirement, not as an aspect of fairness to the accused, but as an element of scientific reliability of test. These devices have an extra chamber to preserve a sample for subsequent testing.